Re: Anyone out there actually like "noisy" images.
artd wrote:
The photo is a representation of the pictorial movement. In the era this was created, there was a controversey about photography being an actual art form, with some claiming it was a simple representation of reality (as opposed to painting, for instance, which required the artist to create his/her own interpretation of reality). The pictorial movement was a response to this line of thinking, where photographers searched for creative ways to manipulate images in order to impart a sense of emotion into them. To put it another way, photographers working in the pictorial tradition were trying to impart \"painterly\" qualities to their photos.
I think the Flatiron photo is a pretty good example of that. It uses a very deliberate process to achieve its unqiue, moody effect with a very well thought out purpose. And I think it\'s a great example of why context does matter when it comes to art.
The interesting thing is that quite a few new photographers - and who among us had not been one? - frequently reinvent ideas that have already been tried and were even popular. It is good to understand some of that context if you are interested in the quality and value of the photographs you create today.
There is a lot of interesting history behind how we thought about and think about photographs and what makes an interesting or good one. One of the very early ideas about what a photograph could do was that it could fix an image of the \"real\" thing, quickly and accurately. Of course, that turns out to basically be impossible - even though lots of folks today still think that is what they are doing. A later development was pictorialism, which turned the tables and asked photographs to be more like paintings - evoke mood and not attempt to be objectively real but to, instead, evoke subjective reaction. Later we have photographers who reacted against that notion (and this group included some who had been pictorialists) and who decided that a photograph is not a painting and that its ability to render with focus precision and so forth might be its virtue. I\'ve often thought of this as the \"let photographs be photographs\" era. Since then there have been and continue to be lots of other ideas about what photographs can do and how they work. Perhaps just the fact that a thing exists as a photograph changes our perception of it - an idea that might be behind a lot of modern photography that might look banal to us. There is a whole school of constructing photographs (Jeff Wall, et al) that is, in some ways, not all that different from what some photographers were doing over a century ago. And on and on and on...
I happen to be one of those who think that a great photographs can and should speak for itself on some effective level and without explanation or context - but this does not at all mean that explanation and context are bad things. The newer the work is, and perhaps the older it is, the more that context might be useful.
It might even make an old Steichen photograph seem like something interesting and compelling. ;-)
Dan
BTW: As far as I\'ve seen, there is no evidence at all that an art like photography will ever be free of \"limitations.\" Waiting for that is hopeless. Better to work with whatever you have and get on with it.
May 06, 2013 at 09:00 PM
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