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 p.175 #15 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
carstenw wrote:
It's funny, in your writing, I can see that your current way of thinking about images is so deeply embedded in you that you can't even reason clearly about it  Before you feel insulted, let me elaborate: you wrote about what the ideal image is for you, in response to my project-oriented post. The thing is that in a project, the individual (even ideal) image is not important, it is the whole which is important.
I don't feel insulted but I can't say that you've clarified what you mean. My point was that I'm not doing themes or projects so the focus is on the individual image and not on the collection as a whole. For me the end unit is the image for you it's a collection of images. Different targets, which was my point.
Think about all the best photos you have ever seen, by the best photographers in the world. I cannot think of any brilliant photo in isolation, without also thinking about all the other photos that photographer has done, which surround and support that image. Ansel Adams was not "Moonrise", but an endless sequence of Sierra and Yosemite images, and Moonrise was just his most popular (yes, yes, it is neither in the Sierras, nor in Yosemite). Edward Weston was not "Pepper Nr. 30" or "Nude, 1936", Paul Strand wasn't "Wall Street", and HCB wasn't "Behind the Saint-Lazare" or "Hyeres" (the bicycle) or the boy with the two wine bottles. There was a body of work in the same style, permeating the same time, infusing their lives at the time of those crucial captures. ...Show more →
In the case of the really famous photographers it's about individual images for me. Again here the unit that I experience is the image, not the collection. That's not to say that I don't like some consistent styles of some photographers. That however is unrelated to content. I'm surprised that you mention Cartier-Bresson though - his photography was anything but thematic. He did street photography and sometimes grouped it by location, but that's no more thematic than me doing landscape photography grouped by location.
The individual shot which becomes famous, which is great, which astonishes people, is a rarity. A one hit wonder. This isn't what photography is all about to me. It is about going beyond that, about depth.
I can understand and respect the documentary nature of some photography where the content provides a general theme that has something to say about the world. That is however not what I'm looking for. For me the individual image is the goal. It's not documentary or set in a real world context. There is a visual consistency in style but definitely not in content. I have a central idea that the image and not the collection of images is based on. A collection is unavoidable from a practical point of view when you are presenting your images to others but for me it is a secondary concern. I try to group the images so that the sequence makes visual sense or by a very broad theme (like travel photos from a specific place), but it's nothing I think of or want to think of when I'm taking the photos.
My two recent/current projects are the cemeteries of Berlin and mechanical details (more like steam locomotive details, but it might evolve). In working on these two projects, again and again, I can feel my gaze maturing, my photos getting better, my eye getting trained. My goal is to make each project strong enough to yield about 12-20 framable shots which I would be proud to hang in an exhibition. I don't know if I will ever do that, but that is my goal, and I will print and frame both these sets in 2011.
I hope you'll post them on the web as well - it would be very interesting to see. That's really a small number of photos you are aiming for though.
I have actually been toying with the idea of doing something thematic. Not because of an interest in making a coherent collection but more to have a longer project to work on. Right now, excluding my travel photos, 90% of my photos are taken during relatively short walks in the same area of Stockholm. It's getting a bit repetitive. During summer the walks are in themselves very nice but now in winter (and winter is long in Sweden) I generally don't enjoy the walks all that much and I really need something more to motivate me to go out and shoot.
So I thought perhaps that I'd make a photo book with photos of castle ruins in Sweden. I love ruins and it would be something I could do for a while. That target there would however be something on the order of 100 or more photos and possibly accompanied with descriptive texts. The point there though is not so much in a coherent body of work but simply that I think it would be an enjoyable process. I really love the process of photography (well, when the weather is OK anyway) and prefer to do it in interesting surroundings.
The eye-opener came for me when in about 2005, after many years of practicing photography (I started seriously when I was 12 or so), I sat down for many nights to compile my very best shots from maybe 15000, and ended up with 36, which I printed. Even then, I felt that not all 36 were equally strong, but more strikingly, when I looked at them, there was little coherence. I had no vision, no idea. It was just found stuff.
Well, that's no surprise. Of course if you take a bunch of random shots taken over a long time and place them in a sequence the results will be confusing. It's not helped if they are really great shots - you get a sensory overload. The problem is that you tried viewing it as a collection where no collection made sense. Yes, you had no vision and no idea for a collection. I'm pretty sure you had a vision and an idea per image.
In practice if you avoid trying to group too large time spans then you won't have a problem. Take my Egypt shots for instance. The idea is embedded in the individual images. There is no general thought that can be applied to the collection. There is however a unifying visual theme and a broad geographic theme. So it works as a collection because it is not bombarding the user with too extreme variations in style.
When I look at what you post here (and I apologize in advance for saying this, but I prefer what you post here to what you have on your website; I know you have stated it the other way around), I see some stunning photos, some shots which I am not sure I could improve upon, but which ultimately don't form anything coherent as a body. They stand tall on their own, but they don't build up to anything. Your 35/1.4 Distagon shot of the tree by the river, stunning, but it stands alone.
That's interesting as the images on my websites are organized in a much more thematic way than the ones I post here. What I post here is really random from a collection point of view. I often post a photo that is only interesting because of its look and without any real content. On my website I have at least tried to group things by general themes and selected images that are palatable by a more general public.
Personally, I'm not sure which I like more. There is one thing I positively hate about my website and that is that Zenfolio insists on applying sharpening of their own on my photos even when viewed in native resolution. So the images don't look the way I want while I have the ones I post here under control. The photos on the website are usually processed with a bit less care as I usually upload a whole gallery at once while here I typically post just 3-4 images.
Interestingly, if you were to compile all your shots across your river where you live, across season and weather, you would have a project, and together they would say much more about this area than any one of them, even the most beautiful, ever could. But you don't sort your images like that.
I don't think trying to force a theme a posteriori would be a good idea. If I wanted a real project there would have to be a central idea for the entire collection and not just for the individual images. Even if you collected all my duck shots in one big collection there would be no unifying idea to span it. There would be a common theme, but a general theme doesn't make a project in my opinion.
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