ANYTHING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN BE DISCUSSED IN COMMENTS.
One subject is SHARPNESS ?
As you can verify at http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/seurat_georges.html Georges Seurat is a famous French impressionist painter. There was recently an exhibition of Seurat drawings at the MOMA (in NYC) which included the image you can see by clicking http://www.flickr.com/photos/18453642@N04/2261040816/ . Look at it. The MOMA show was reviewed by John Updike, novelist and art major, who - in a way - gave "first place" to this image which is published in his article in the NY Review of Books, January 17, 2008.
Obviously, it is deliberately "out of focus." Out-of-focus is much less natural to painting than to photography, where we have a lens ready at all times to produce out-of-focus images. Yet this Seurat hangs in museums. My point is this: does a "tack-sharp" image (a favorite phrase of some judges) really represent a great achievement in this age of autofocus? Every xerox machine will also do it - every gorilla with autofocus - it is strictly mechanical - so what's so great about "tack sharpness."
Is it a virtue of a photograph to be sharp? The Seurat pictures could have been easily made with a camera. Should it be disqualified as "creative?" Is focusing more artistic?? In other words, should a creative entrant be free to submit out-of-focus work without "breaking rules?"
Indeed, the original Leica lenses included a 90mm f2.2 Leitz "Thambar" (see http://shutterbug.com/equipmentreviews/lenses/0405classic/) which was designed to produce out-of-focus pictures. Heresy in hidebound photo clubs?
Another issue: If you go to a library, or to http://www.newsweek.com/id/73349 you can look at a very recent issue of Newsweek where you will find an article entitled "Is Photography Dead?" by a journalist claiming that photography has "fractured itself beyond all recognition" and "seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality."
The article includes a Cindy Sherman self-portrait which is blamed "for its factual validity that has been manipulated and pixelated to the point of extinction." You cannot see all the article illustrations on the Internet, but the author's prize exhibit, enlarged over two pages, is a photograph of supermarket shelves from a high perspective, with wonderful depth of focus, showing every product. It is blamed for the fact that "perspective has been manipulated" to make the supermarket look large.
Some say nonsense to this argument: the perspective is that of a longer rather than a shorter one. In pre-Photoshop days, anybody with an enlarger could incline lensboard, film holder and easel to intersect at certain angle laws (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle - isn't the Internet wonderful?) and change perspective at will in exactly the manner shown in the magazine. The journalist has not looked into film darkroom, and has probably not heard of Scheimpflug.
But some journalists have Luddite technophobia. Remember TA or transactional analysis, where if you said "I'm OK, you're OK" you were alright but if you said "I'm not OK, you're OK," you needed help? Well, today, using mathematics to design a lens is OK, using mathematics to design a Photoshop command is not-OK. Fertilizing with manure is OK, but science and technology are suspect and have no soul. On top of that, saying that this detailed supermarket picture that shows every bag of peanuts and every price is a "Photoshop fairy tale" and has only a "tiny trace of a small fragment of reality" is absurd. All of us are not free of blame either. Many are blaming digital photography for "manipulation" and few remember that manipulation has been practiced since the 1830's, and that manipulated and staged photographs by Henry Peach Robinson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Reylander, Man Ray, and others hang in museums. In the 1970's, many slides by very many members were derivations, either made by sandwiching or double-exposing unto color film different Kodalith positives and negatives through red, blue and green filters. Manipulation? Come on! Poor manipulating Cindy Sherman! Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother and her children were talked to before being shot with the children hiding their faces, Robert Doisneau has been blamed for asking couples to kiss in Paris street scenes, and Yusuf Karsh snatched a cigar out of the mouth of Winston Churchill to get the "angy bulldog" look. Manipulation? Hype!
We are also on thin ice for having coined the inappropriate word "creative" for manipulated photographs, and "reality" for everything else. In the early 1900's, when philosophers discussed whether photography was art, straight machine reproduction was considered "soulless." Today, machine reproduction is done by Xerox, or with a bank surveillance camera. There is total "reality" there. It seems that every good photograph has an element of selection and interpretation, and is different from the images in the surveillance camera. Should this be called manipulation? Is it creative? Is it reasonable to divide our competitions into two categories: "creative, manipulated, fairy tale" and "traditional, old-fashioned, reality?" A single category is where all the great photos are in the new edition of Beaumont Newhall's "The History of Photography" (ISBN 0-87070-381-1, $26 at Amazon). He was director of the George Eastman House in Rochester and involved with the MOMA in New York. Purchase his book and see whether you can meaningfully divide the many great photographs into arbitrary classes. You decide.
Click on COMMENTS, say what you think.
