RustyBug
Offline
• • • • • • •
Upload & Sell: On
|
 p.1947 #8 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
airfrogusmc wrote:
My experience is once that stuff in your subconscious it can take a very long time for it to get out of there. It's hard to unlearn. I would even argue that they (all those rules) can even be harmful. Once those things are in the head (subconscious) or in some case some photographers even have with them etched on focusing screens they are very hard to unlearn or un-see when making photographs or judging photographs.
Those rules are great if you want to make photographs like everyone else's. Like Weston was getting at is if everyone is following the same rules there can be no freshness of vision. But what do/did Weston, Winogrand, Adams, Newman, Brandt, Klein, Michals. Maisel know about photography? They forgot, over their long careers, what most of us have learned. And there are very good reasons why they will all still be in the conversation about photography as an art form in the decades to come. ...Show more →
+1 that if folks are taught to think the "rule" is the "end game", then they can be programmed to a restrictive state of mind. For some folks they may never let go of that. But, I think that for folks that have a spirit of growth (which is embodied in creativity, as create = new), they can get past it well enough.
A carpenter or cabinet maker gets taught, "measure twice, cut once". But when the woodworker decides to embark on sculpture, the deftness of learning to use the chisel foregoes the previous rules of construction that were valuably learned. One has to decide for themselves whether or not the tool is applicable or not. Just because a rule was learned, doesn't render one incapable of progressing without the rule.
Does it require a mental shift ... sure. But I think that the history of development of a given artisan always includes the addition of different things to their arsenal as experience grows, and those things have the ability to displace / replace former things. Sometimes we hear of artisans having "this period" and "that period". Imo, the "rules period" is just that ... a period in the journey.
Whether a person stays in the "same period" ... say always using high contrast, high saturation ... never bothering to learn the nuance of other palettes, that lack of growth is (to me) no different than staying stuck in a "rules period". Growth is growth. The corollary being that if a person WANTS TO GROW, they will move beyond the "rules period", the same as they would move on through any other form of variant growth.
If a person doesn't want to grow, and remain content with whatever "period" that is they're comfortable with ... so be it, that's what they'll do. Imo, that's predominantly the person making that assessment of their goals, not the rule restricting them from growing.
We get taught to drive between the lines ... those are the rules, and they have a certain benefit in learning them. BUT, then racers learn the principles of physics, and suddenly those rules about the lines are meaningless as one makes way to the apex in entry and exit, relative to position steering and throttle. If a person is set to stay within the rules, there is nothing wrong with that ... but, when you want to learn to advance beyond the rules ... YUP, you're gonna have some new things to learn, and some old things to set aside. Again, it wasn't the presence of the rule that facilitates or mitigates growth ... (imo) it's the determination of the individual to remain content with the constraints of the rule, or to learn how to proceed sans the rules.
|
