PHOTOGRAPHERS, UNLIKE PAINTERS, ARE, SEEMINGLY (AS EVIDENCED BY THE SHEER VOLUME OF WRITTEN WORDS), obsessed with attempting to come up with answer to the question, what is a photograph? Or, perhaps, more accurately, an answer to the question, what is it that makes a good-better-best photograph?. Pianters, on the other hand, do not seem to concerned with the question, what is a painting?
iMo, while there are many interesting tidbits to be found here and there amongst the writings, re: photography, in the end it is all very subjective idle chatter. I believe that to be true cuz I believe that each and every photograph is, quite literally, a Rorschach test-like image from which a nearly endless number of deductions / conclusions / meanings / feelings can be had. Not to mention the fact that one person's adjudged great photograph may be headed for another person's junk pile.
That written, my experience, taken from the millions of written words-books and selected quotes written by photographers-I have read on the topic, leads me to conclude that are 2 main camps involved in this ongoing idle chatter; on the one side there is the simpledminded crowd, and on the other side, there is heavylifter crowd. FYI, I tend to come down on the side of the simplminded crowd.
Re: the simplemided crowd - is not stupid. iMo, they just try to keep it simple / pure (as "constrained" by the limits and capabililities of the medium and its apparatus). Think Gary Winogrand:
"I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph....For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.
In a sense, the simpledmided crowd acts upon the idea that a picture is "just" a picture. A thing to be looked at. A "simple" visual experience which, nevertheless, can lead / incite a viewer to go wherever he/she might want to go, limited only by an individual viewer's knowledge and life experience.
Re: the heavylifter crowd - has, seemingly, never viewed a photograph upon which they can heap too much of a burden which does not break a pictures back. Think Robert Adams:
"If the proper goal of art is, as I now believe, Beauty, the Beauty that concerns me is that of Form...Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life...that is, the order in art that mirrors the order in Creation itself...Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and therefore our suffering is without meaning."
In his writings, re: "important" pictures Adams states that most "important" pictures "reveal Form"...."show us coherence in its deepest sense" and "contain the full Truth, the full and final truth." ASIDE All of the preceding is from Robert Adams is from his book, BEAUTY IN PHOTOGRPAHY. END OF ASIDE
Try as I might, and I have read and re-read Adams' essay, Beauty in Photography over and over and over again over the past few days, I just cannot get to where Adams wants me to go. The metaphysical burden is just too heavy for me to lift. I suppose it is possible a little weed might help me get somewhere in the Adams neighborhood when contemplating a specific picture. However...
....I have no real interest in turning my picture viewing (or, more emphatically, my picture making) into a quest for pictures which contain the full and final truth, the coherence and structure underlying life in its deepest sense and the Form / Beauty in art that mirrors the order in Creation itself. I just sounds too much like religion to me.
