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SINCE MY ACQUISITION OF THE FIRST iPHONE WITH THE 0.5 lens setting-14mm equivalent-I have been, making pictures with that setting with no conscious directive of creating body of work focused upon the optical characteristics of that lens. As a matter of fact, when using that lens, I continually experience a guilt-driven suspicion that I am employing the lens to create a photographic cheap trick / effect.
Nevertheless, I plunged ahead cuz, as stated in the a wider view of things gallery on my WORK page, I use this lens, not for its extended field of view, but rather for the emphasis it creates on the visual elements of line, shape, and space as seen across the 2D plane of a photographic print. And, cuz I boldly went where no one has gone before (ha), I find myself with yet another uninitentionally made “found” body of work comprised of 55 pictures made with the 0.5 / 1.5 (14mm-e) lens.
And, much to my relief, cheap trick guilt wise, I have validation that I was making these pictures for all the “right”reasons / intentions (ok, ok, albeit unconsciously):
“Clement Greenberg’s dictate that each art ought to “determine through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself.”…Numerous photographers have made photographs about photography-enlisting, even embracing, the visual peculiarities of the medium that capable professionals once avoided or indirectly acknowledged….[they] purposely court and coax the perceptual ambiguities and accident visual excesses typically found in unselfconscious amateur snapshots. When imaginatively enlisted to achieve fastidiously formal and/or provocatively narrative images, such effects become crucial elements in a vivid and vital vernacular.” ~ Sally Eauclaire / the new color photography
FYI, one of the photographers Eauclaire calls out in chapter 3: THE VIVID VERNACULAR is Harry Callahan, about whose work she writes:
“While color photographs produced with relatively conventional lenses feature flattened spaces, Callahan/s extreme wide-angle lens imposes the reverse, so exaggerating near/far disparities that buildings lean away diagonally, gesturing anthropomorphically…Because the disorienting diagonals obviate stability and tranquility, Callahan has devised a spatial choreography in which rollicking voids and solids are equal, counteractive compositional partners. The result: photographs that burst into view, the color-dense sections discharging energy as they collide, giving the images a peculiarly photographic verve and pizazz.”
So, given all of the above, here’s the deal - Does it matter, re: making (Fine) Art wise, that all of the aforementioned pictures were made in a manner sans the conscious intent of what might be labeled as the above artsy-fartsy speak? No. Cuz it is not the intent that matters, it is the pictures that matter.* However, it is worth noting that as I continue to make pictures in this 0.5/1.5(14mm-e) manner, with confidence buoyed by artsy-fartsy speak, I will shed my “cheap trick” guilt and strive to, in fact, maximize this specific peculiar visual effect of the medium thus turning the traditional and derisive visual effect proscriptive, re: wide angle “distortion, on its head.
PS another the medium’s visual “peculiarity” that I am mining is lens+aperture based effect of limited DOF - see my AROUND THE HOUSE work / gallery on my WORK page.
* rationalization is more important than sex. Just try getting through a day without a juicy rationalization.