The fact that some think the Cartier-Bresson the image is great just because it is famous without understanding the context which made it famous are equally myopic. It wasn\'t discovered in a dusty trunk in someone\'s attic last week, it was acknowledged at the time it was taken in the 1930s as having unique qualities the majority of other photographs at the time lacked.
What makes something art? There are clues about that in Kaden K\'s quote of C-B\'s on sharpness. If you read the the story of Cartier-Bresson\'s evolution as a photographer you will find he came from the bourgeois class he pretentiously mocks. His bourgeois parents funded his education and his deviation from the norms of the day came only after learning them. He apparently didn\'t become an art snob until after attending a renowned private art academy.
Snobbery and having more money than one knows what to do with are the two engines that that drive the world of art and fashion since art moved from caves to villas and cathedrals. So it surprises me not that some of the most pretentious snobs and self appointed arbiters of what defines art in photography here jumped on this thread immediately.
Over the history of art it has been mentors and wealthy patrons who have elevated the reputation unknown artists. When people have enough money to take care of all of of the more basic levels of Mazlo\'s pyramid they start buying art, often not because they actually like it, but because someone richer and more famous has one by the same artist hanging on their wall. They buy a bigger more expensive one.
Would we have ever heard of Jackson Pollock or Josef Albers if some rich guy hadn\'t bought their paintings on the advice of some snobbish art critic?
Few acknowledged as famous artists have been overnight success stories or untrained in the basics. If you read the embedded links above you\'ll discover how Buonarroti\'s talent developed and evolved. There is a frequently retold story about Picasso being hounded by a well-heeled tourist seeking to buy one of his works. Picassso took a piece of paper and with three strokes of a pen created an abstract image of a bull and presented it with an outrageous bill. Shocked at the amount the would be patron of the arts asked why so much for a few seconds of scribling, to which Picasso allegedly replied, \"It took a lifetime of drawing bulls normally to understand how to express the essence of one in three strokes of a pen. That\'s what you are paying for.\"
Few of the people who write professionally about art were ever artists themselves. One of the better art history tomes I own The Story of Painting was written by Sister Wendy Beckett who taught English and Latin. In the introduction to his book Writing About Art Professor Henry M. Sayre reveals that he too taught literature and composition before art appreciation. The preface of the book opens with this statement: \"As a teacher of undergraduate courses in art appreciation and art history, I have always felt that one of the most important activities of students engage in is writing. It is my conviction that the better, and the sooner, students write about what they seem, the better they will see.\" I said the same thing in critique a few days ago here.
In his book Sayre uses another famous 1932 Cartier-Bresson photo of a man jumping across a flooded space with his action mirrored on a circus poster in the wall behind him. I\'d missed the connection until I read his analysis. Again quoting Sayer quoting Cartier-Bresson: \"In fact, the reflection in the water eerily mirrors the poster on the wall. Cartier-Bresson called this the \'decisive moment\' — the photographer realizes that \'by releasing the shutter at that precise instant,\" he has\'instinctively selected the exact geometric harmony, and that without this the photograph would have been lifeless.\'
To my knowledge Sister Wendy or Henry Sayre never lifted a paint brush or camera except to capture an image of a work to study from a formal critical framework. I bought and have read both books several times to better understand how to make my eyes and brain more critical beyond what I learned to practice and incorporate new approaches and ideas. Formal critique as taught by Sayre and others I\'ve read is a process of reacting emotionally then trying to understanding how the elements of a composition work together or in opposition to trigger those emotions. As in the case of Cartier-Bresson, the historical impact of his style needs to be viewed by comparison between how different people with differing points of view depicted the same content in entirely different ways during his era.
So no I didn\'t learn about Cartier-Bresson\'s \"decisive moment\" philosophy 30 minutes ago via the link or on Wikipedia. There was a chapter devoted to \"decisive moment\" shooting in the first book on Photojournalism I read nearly 40 years ago. It wasn\'t part of the curriculum at any famous school I attended. I have never liked school much but when something interests me I have always sought out the best sources of information about it independently from books and by finding the most knowledgable mentors I can find.
I could have finished my art major at a small liberal arts college with no photography program, but chose instead to drop out and seek a mentor and \"real world\" experience. Some mention that all the time when quoting my advice (usually out of context to nit-pick an unimportant detail) as a way of telling others they think theirs was more \"real\".
More real than the grind of shooting a wedding or two every weekend and doing all the other more mundane stuff in a \"mom and pop\" business requires? It\'s the success in doing the more mundane stuff that in the end determines whether a photography business is successful or not. It didn\'t take me 10 years of trial by error and running my own business into the ground to discover what it takes and that the hours and pay sucks in any mom&pop business like photography, which like landscaping and house painting are the few remaining vocations that require no formal training and little in the way of capital. The barrier to becoming a pro photographer in the 70s was the cost of the gear. The lack of decent gear not the desire to take photos was the roadblock to the millions Kodak sold its cameras to. Technology has leveled the playing field to where anyone can play. The concept of craftsmanship has become obsolete and dismissed as \"old school\" in the age of 30 second sound bites and 140 word tweets. As you might guess I don\'t use Twitter
Sure some worked longer as a pro than I did, but few worked for a better one. It\'s no how long you spend learning something its who you learn from and how quickly you learn and how you apply it that counts.
I got my job with Zucker by going home and cutting down all my carefully matted 11x14 zone system prints based on all the new knowledge I\'d gained by his patient critique of each with a pair of \"L\" shaped cropping guides. My hand hovered over the first one for what seemed like an hour before I made the first cut because I had no way to replace them. I got hired over many more qualified applicants, because when I went back to show him what I\'d done he saw that he wouldn\'t be wasting his time training me. That and the fact I was willing to start for $50 a week.
The low pay and lack of any viable career path is main reason I left Zucker and moved on towards other goals. It took me about a year to realize pro photography it wasn\'t all flashbulbs and roses even at the very top of the profession where Zucker was at the time. Understanding the the key to his success was largely do to his extroverted/feeling temperament and realizing mine was a polar opposite made me realize that all things considered I\'d be happier with a 9-5 job with a pension at the end with photography as an avocation, which it has been off and on ever since. By the early 80s I was in the Foreign Service and my goal in life was simple and had nothing to do with photography: make and save money and retire early. I have a lot of time to pontificate between rounds of golf and its been raining a lot this week
What qualifies me to criticize the work of others here and dare teach lighting and photography it in my unconventional way? I like to think its the mentoring from people I respected and who knew way more about it than me at the time, reading lots of books, then getting off my ass and validating the newly acquired knowledge by getting off my ass and doing a lot of systematic experimenting with process control tools so I could understand what actually caused the differences my eyes saw in ways that would otherwise fool my brain.
Did that make me more creative? No. But it was the book learning and systematic testing to validate it that got me up the learning curve to the point where I realized realize that photography is entirely based on optical illusion and its all about fooling the brain into connecting 2D patterns of contrast and form created with lighting with stored \"real world\" memory if stuff. Things like lighting patterns on faces are more effective when they resemble the idealized mental image of a face. Jesus on the Shroud of Turin is in Butterfly lighting. When seen on burnt toast and oil stains in driveways it either than or short lighting. Understand that and the rest of the dots start to fall into place and its easy to figure out where on the floor the light stand needs to go
When I C&C a photo I know where those shadow and highlight clues fall and what things technically make the nose shadow in a portrait either darker or lighter than the shadows on the slde of the face and what effect all those things have on the perception of shape and where the eye gets attracted. That\'s the technical and perceptual cause and effect which sets up the delivery of the content and the emotional reaction. As I frequently say in my detailed critiques, like a joke the emotional impact of a photo is all about the timing the delivery and arrival of the eye on the punchline focal point to bring context and implied action together into the \"I get it!\" emotional reaction.
As Sayre suggests in his book I\'ve learned more by writing critiques of the work of others over the last ten years on the critiquing the work of others than I did for the first 30 taking photos in the way I prefer based on my personal preferences. I can only offer advice based on what has worked for me over past 40 years I\'ve used a cameras of different types vocationally and avocationally, and I try to make it understood why the advice I give works constructively.
Critiquing photos I would have never taken myself but find effective challenges me get past my to understand what made them work and I incorporate that new understanding into photos I take. But when trying to teach the concepts I try to do what every teacher does — start with the conventions and fundamentals of what makes the underlying magic work or not.
Anyone can throw a lump of clay on a wheel, create a crooked pot and then declare it \"art\". If they put a $5,000 price tag on it eventually it might catch some rich patron\'s eye and he\'ll buy it. Then everyone will want one.
Others might find it more of a challenge to turn out a flawless identical service for 8. That takes a bit longer to learn and is quite boring.
But after learning to throw a technically perfect pot on the wheel its much easier to know how to mush one up and create art.
That\'s why I blur and darken the edges of most digital shots I take and critique here after first correcting the tonal range and color balance to the context of the message
Sep 08, 2011 at 12:00 PM
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