The Online Photographer

In the comments to the previous "Fun Facts" posts, Moose wrote:

It's easy to trivialize what the colorist [of Nadar's Liszt portrait] has done. I too find the color overdone. Or perhaps just odd in a photo of that obvious vintage? Would an oil painted portrait with the same colors seem overdone?

Also, there's a reason so many old B&Ws with people in them were toned. I wonder if the original of this image might have been. Pure B&W, as this is on screen, is unkind to our faces.

The colorist has also done something quite good, correcting the unpleasant highlights in the eyes. Nadar was one of the first to experiment with electric lighting—and it wasn't quite right here.

Herewith some alternative amounts of color, and the nicer eyes dropped in so you can see the effect.

Here's Moose's link—take a look. A very nice job.

Of course, I can see the point of discussing this—it's an interesting question aesthetically, and discussing just this sort of thing can help people calibrate their own feelings and tastes towards color in general, not just "colorization."

Personally, whether fortunately or unfortunately, I have an ethical reaction to such issues that tends to supersede further discussion—it's that the creator of a work of art retains "moral ownership" of his or her artwork, and for other people to modify it is, on an ethical level, disrespectful.

It doesn't even matter if Nadar had wanted the image to be in color but didn't have the means to make it so. He controls the version he releases, and the "real" image is the one that respects the work he saw and put his stamp of approval on.

I was interested to learn that this is one of the reasons Josef Koudelka is releasing so many publications now. He is reportedly appalled by what's being done with Cartier-Bresson's archive and doesn't want the same thing done to his work after his death. That is, he considers the work to be his (moral ownership) and not for other people to sully or change or confuse—or exploit—after he's gone.

The opposite argument can be made in many ways, and I'm sensible to that. Copyright law allows for "transformative" uses that extends in rare cases up to straight copies (Richard Prince, who I don't approve of) and mere selection (Michael Wolf, Jon Rafman, and Doug Rickard et al., whose work I do approve of), and of course "sampling" is common in music (I can see the reasons why, but I've always been uneasy with it—cf. the latter chapters of Perfecting Sound Forever).

In my world, you can't colorize any B&W original respectfully. Or rather, no one but the original creator can do so. Of course, there's a whole 'nuther level to the argument, namely the degree to which an original is art. Is an old film noire "B" movie really "art"? Did its makers have sufficient intentionality that the original should be respected? I'd err on the side of "yes." I realize counterarguments could indeed have persuasiveness.

I'm not saying my position is "correct" or that you should agree with it, but I like coming down on the side of the artist, as his or her ally in seeing that his or her intentions are respected. It's part and parcel of who I am, and what I do. I'm aware that other people swing to the other side of the spectrum.

Still, shunting ethical "ownership" objections aside entirely—that is, assuming for the sake of discussion that you were the creator of the picture or were advising the creator, as in a crit—Moose's colorizations can be discussed on an entirely aesthetic level, and it would indeed be interesting to do so. Which do you prefer?

I think you can guess my choice. :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Moose)

Moose replies: Without taking a position on what Mike calls 'moral ownership' that should be protected—because I'm not certain what my position may be after more thought—a few data points:

I have casually collected various versions of "The Birth of Venus." One could easily see them as falling under the category of inappropriate revisions of Botticelli's original.

And yet, it's clear that Botticelli was riffing on other antecedents. The Wikipedia entry on this painting spends some time talking about various known and speculated sources that inspired this work.

...Such a deliberately re-creative act as Botticelli may have performed with his Birth of Venus would go a long way towards explaining the curious flatness and linearity of the painting, which seem so very out of keeping with the direction of Renaissance art and with Botticelli's own approach to painting.

In music, things get even trickier. We will never hear Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and so on as they performed their own compositions. Nor will we ever know what they might think of later performances. Would Beethoven prefer Toscannini or Furtwängler for his Ninth? (To pick opposites.)

Imitation with variation is at the heart of much of one of Mike's favorite forms of music. I personally prefer much of Mark Isham's Miles Davis Remembered: The Silent Way Project to the Davis originals.

Here, as in painting, there is also a long tradition of "Variations on a theme of ..." Again with layers, as with Rachmaninoff's 20 variations and coda on a theme composed by Corelli, which is in turn an homage to Fritz Kreisler's set of variations on the same Corelli theme.

St. Ansel famously compared negative and individual print to musical score and performance. As a concert quality pianist, he would surely be aware of this tradition of musical variations, and almost certainly of the artistic tradition of paintings that draw on antecedants. What would he think of prints made after his death?* Especially if, eventually, they strayed from his own approach?

Just some ideas to broaden the discussion. It's not a simple issue.

Aside from the issue of intellectual property rights in law, is it possible that the release of creative work into the world might not properly end the creator's interest in and control of the work?

The original stands on its own two feet, beside any other work derived from it. It's not like derivative versions erase the original. Any creative work of humankind is inevitably a variation on the themes of the artist's and other cultures. Should it not properly enter that stream, enrich it?

Even Isaac Newton's famous statement on this issue, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" is itself derivative of earlier ideas expressed by others at least hundreds of year earlier.

Hmmm, does that sound like nascent opinion...?

[*I'm not exactly positive about this, but I believe Ansel made it clear that he would like students to be able to print his negatives after his death as learning experiences, but the holders of his archive at the University of Arizona don't allow this because the original negatives are considered too precious. I'd have to research this claim to be more sure of it, so don't quote me. But if true, it adds a couple more layers of complexity. —Mike]

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Glenn Brown:

Reader Francis E wrote an excellent and interesting comment about the "Scenic Photography" post:

"If you don't see 'information' in a landscape photo, the chances are you don't know enough about the landscape in question to recognise it. This is not unusual these days. Maybe you only see a pretty orange leaf, but someone with botanical knowledge is looking at the shape of the leaves and estimating the age of the tree from its bark and form. Maybe you just see rocks, but someone with some  geological knowledge is admiring the glacial features. Adams's famous image of aspens is interesting to me because the tall straight trunks are like the mountain ash forests around here. I can infer something about the light and feel; I am there just by looking at it. And I think he assumed that level of knowledge in order to evoke that feeling.

"Landscape photography is a bit like classical music in that an untrained ear might just hear lots of instruments playing at once and not understand what's going on. Someone used to harmony from an early age who has learned about sonata form will simply get more out of it.

"Now, 'scenic' may mean something else, depending on how you define it. Is it landscape photography which does not demand any background knowledge (just as muzak appropriates classical music's form but is not classical music)? Or is it your own perjorative term for landscape photography you do not understand because you do not understand the landscape? If the former, your criticism is justified; it is like muzak or junk food. But if you classify all landscape photography as scenics then I think it is your problem and your loss."

My reply is that I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think it's as simple as you're making it. It's not entirely in the viewer. It's in how the photographer photographs. A photographer with knowledge of a terrain and natural features could take pictures that are "landscape and nature photography" without being "scenic." "Scenery" can be defined as "the natural features of land or landscape considered in terms of their appearance," "especially when picturesque, beautiful or intended to impress." (I put that together from several dictionary definitions.) That by definition makes an informed or analytical approach at best secondary, at worst completely subsumed. My problem with a lot of scenic photography is that the photographer is less aware of the meaning and information in the picture than I am, not more, and it's not his or her intention to investigate it or show it to me, or even inform me about what's clearly there in the picture. The example I used was the most basic: the location. A landscape photographer will usually tell you where the landscape is. The landscape photographer is respecting the specificity of the particular landscape. A scenic photographer doesn't care, and moreover doesn't care whether you care—he wants it to be generalized, generic, an idea of landscape rather than an actual place with distinctive aspects.

I think to really pursue this discussion—which I'd do if I were teaching a class—we'd have to start looking at specific examples, so we don't talk past each other because we base our terms on differing assumptions about the work we're talking about. No matter how you define things, we could not only pleasantly argue the definitions but dig up examples where the definitions overlapped or didn't seem to pertain.

I can tell you how my thinking on this subject first began to evolve, many, many years ago. I was looking through some scenic travel picture books in the discount section of a bookstore. I looked through books on India, Portugal, etc., and then I came across one on Vermont. Well, I lived in Vermont at the time, and I traveled around in it, and I looked around me. Which made it easy to realize how little the pictures in the book resembled the place and how little the place resembled the pictures in the book. By being super-selective, exclusionary, and seeking only to show the pretty and the picturesque in a prettified and pictorial way, the photographers of the picture book had presented what amounted to an imaginary Vermont.

Of course it's possible for viewers to look at pictures and not understand what they're looking at—that happens constantly. But what makes a photograph a "scenic," to my mind, is more a responsibility and an intention on the part of the photographer.

An example I use to illustrate this is the iconic Steamboat poster shot by Gerald Brimacombe and art directed by Mix Beauvais, who was Director of Sales for the Steamboat ski resort at the time, and the Wilson Griak ad agency: 

Steamboat Ski and Resort Corp.

The More Barn picture (the barn is, or was, owned by a family named More) has earned the overused epithet "iconic." It was done by professionals as a publicity shot—the riders were models and the skis were a particular brand, Hart—but it's a perfect example of quintessential scenic photography and, further, demonstrates the way scenic photography differs from landscape or documentary phtography. In this case the location is revealed (and in fact is the point), but the representation of it is highly romanticized and carefully idealized. I didn't know the area in 1972 when the picture was made, but in 1993 when I was in Steamboat Springs the barn was hardly identifiable as the one in the poster—the hillside behind it is dotted with hulking luxury homes and condos, there was a busy road just down the hill from it—across which was a trailer park at the time—and quite close by were many developed buildings including a dry cleaner and a car wash (or maybe it was a muffler shop). This picture itself might have been "straight," but the report it gives of reality is highly...shall we say...editorialized. On purpose, of course. But still.

Tellingly, I'm told there are only a few circumscribed angles where scenic photographers can get their unsullied scenic shots of the barn, narrow angles where they're able to exclude all the reality that crowds in from every direction. Those spots are popular, I'm told. There are many shots of the More Barn online.

So you could photograph this particular "scene" many ways, with many ideas in mind. I'd love to make a shot of it showing what really surrounds it—I think that would be more interesting than making a sort of bucolic western fantasy out of it. But that's just me. (And maybe my shot would only be interesting because of its contrast to the famous poster.) I would say that "scenic" photography does to nature and landscape about what advertising photography does to the products it depicts. Documentary honesty, informational content, and accurate meaning are just not what are intended. There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach; it's just frustrating when you're looking for something else out of photographs is all.

I should qualify these comments by noting that this picture also makes a great example because it's a really great shot that works spectacularly well in the way it was intended to work. That helps get across the point that I'm not sitting in judgement of scenic photography necessarily, and not criticizing either those who practice it or those who enjoy it. It just doesn't particularly float my boat. No harm in that. I can't be expected to like everything.

I also think I could argue that, many times, art, documentary, and reportorial photography err in the opposite direction, purposely making everything look gritty, ugly, and exposed, as if to ratify a photographer's stance as a hard-bitten and hard-hitting realist. I admire photographers who let their work go both ways—who are not afraid to show the ugly, but not afraid to show the beautiful as well—sometimes both at once. There are many landscape photographers who walk that line successfully, I think.

Mike
(Thanks to Francis E)

ADDENDUM: Here's another post on more or less this same subject: Ranchos de Taos

And here's another (see the Addendum with Rondal Partridge's delightful picture of Half Dome): Impress Watch This

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Sal Santamaura: "Re: the More barn image. At least it reveals the ski trails on that background mountain. For 27 years, until I concluded that 7,700' elevation is probably not the best place to relocate when elderly and sold it, I owned an acre of land above and behind the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Although not a Steven King fan, I did waste some time watching when a mini-series remake of 'The Shining' that had been shot at that location aired. It was most entertaining to know that, if the cameras panned ninety degrees, a Safeway and its parking lot would be in their frames.  :-) "

Michael Matthews: "Reality does intrude."

David Miller: "It's just as well I delayed my table-thumping response to the first chapter of this post—I am mollified by chapter two and a well-drawn distinction between 'scenic' photographs and 'landscape' photographs. (Admittedly, there is usually more value for me in the infrequent occasions when I find myself disagreeing with you, Mike, than the rest of the time when your posts provide a comfortable affirmation of my biases. It's good when you challenge me to think hard and clearly.)

"I fancy myself to be a landscape photographer—though sometimes the landscapes I photograph may be all of six inches wide. I am occasionally troubled when what I judge to be a successful 'artistic' image also turns out the be a pretty-pretty photograph suitable for inclusion in a commercial calendar."

David Paterson: "Re: 'but it's a perfect example of quintessential scenic photography.' Actually, no it's not. It's an advertising photograph—you say so yourself. It is staged, no doubt highly stage-managed, contrived. idealised, worked-on, and has no meaning or reality outside the context of the ad it was shot for. It is a million miles from either 'scenic' or 'landscape' photographs which are usually intended to celebrate, reveal and explain their subject in some way. This photograph is intended to get people to spend money. The difference between scenic and landscape photography is similar in degree and nuance to that between pretty and beautiful. The photographer's intent is important, too. If you're shooting illustrations for a travel guide, you are probably going to shoot, at best, pretty scenics; if you hike into remote countryside in the hours before dawn, you are going to try to shoot landscapes, perhaps beautiful ones."

Mike replies: Great comment, but I think I'd argue that you're mixing categories. What a picture is made for and how its makers want it to function is a very important constellation of issues, but it doesn't describe what the picture is categorically. In fact a lot of criticism involves recontextualizing photographs made for other purposes. I'd say the More Barn shot is a scenic originally shot for PR. If it were originally shot for a Hart ski ad or to decorate a hotel lobby, would that change what the picture is? A scenic is a scenic wherever you find it and for whatever reason it was made.

Lars S.: "live in the black forest in Germany. I really like living here, I like the woods, the hills, I feel at home here.

"But one or two years ago, I was so annoyed by the idealized, romantic image that is always painted of it, that I decided to go and photograph the ugly, boring and bleak side of it. Just to kind of balance it out again (at least for me). So I set out whenever the weather was bad and went to all the same touristy spots and tried to take all the pictures that would make no sane person want to come here. And what fun it was! I was off of photographing when the weather was good and had something to do in bad weather. And I could go out photographing late in the afternoon and at dusk, which goes along well with me being a night owl.

"Now that the project has about come to an end, I can sometimes even enjoy just taking a pretty picture of the scenery again.

""Here is a little selection of pictures from the project. (Also note the subtitles.) (Sorry it's on Google+, but I haven't gotten round to finish my website yet. But one can view the pictures without having to create an account or something.)"

Struan: "I see scenic photography as a social issue rather than an aesthetic one. It's the nice, easy-to-like stuff that everyone can hum along to and chat about (or retweet) without fear of contradiction or giving offense. It's also the nice, easy-to-like stuff that amateur photographers can make for themselves, safe in a self-referential bubble of 'good photography.'

"As a hobby, or a commercial activity, there is nothing wrong with this per se. It is when the standards and conventions harden into dogma, and become a stick to beat others with that I get hacked off. All those golden hour, no-hand of man restrictions begin to look less like a utilitarian, journeyman rule of thumb, and more like a way to stake a claim to absolute authority. That authority is real, and it has real effects.

"An example. The picture shows a lovely wee secluded glen in Sutherland, Scotland. It is highly suffused with the cult of wilderness, and is regularly photographed from a nearby easy-to-climb mountain as an example of the unspoilt, pristine wild.

"It doesn't take much botanical knowledge to see that there was once a settlement there, or much in the way of history or ecology to know that the Highland landscape is a cultural one, formed by consciously-formed policy and patterns of land use. Wilderness it ain't. In fact, the grandchildren of the people who were forcibly cleared from this particular settlement are still alive, as can be found out by a quick trip to the village hall. It doesn't take finely-honed political antennae to understand that land reform and ownership and economic control over places like this is a political hot-potato in Scotland today.

"The conventionalists of scenic photography deliberately ignore all that. The consequences go beyond a lack of individual self awareness, because the pleasing delusions labelled by the conventions as good and desirable then go on to influence—in some cases, dominate—decision making and policy setting in the real world of contemporary social issues.

"What you do with background information about the landscapes you photograph is up to you, but for me, ignoring it completely, and positively asserting something you could easily prove to be false, seems to go well beyond a simple lack of awareness. The photographers I admire, feed that information back into the soul of the project, informing and influencing its direction and scope. That doesn't mean I think that every photograph should be an explicit political slogan, but I find it harder and harder to accord any respect to the photographic equivalent of Marie Antoinette delighting in her shampooed sheep and their lovely silk halters."

Sorry there got to be so many redundant comments yesterday. I wasn't being particularly slow at my moderation duties—it's just that the comments came pouring in thick and fast after I wrote the post, and before I could get back to the computer and post some of them, to let people know the point had already been raised, there were 80 comments or so waiting for me.

I did take peoples' advice: I bought SanDisk's RescuePRO Deluxe software and I'm running it on the card. I don't think it will work, as I reformatted and overwrote the card several times in the course of my speed testing. But the program is currently saying it needs 801 minutes to continue the recovery process, and although this doesn't seem like it could be right, I'm going to let it run and see what happens. I'll let you know.

This past weekend (when it was still cold) we hiked a dramatic stony gorge to see a frozen waterfall. It's a public park so the path was broad and accomodating, but it was covered with snow and there weren't too many people—at least not enough to call them "crowds." Gorges can be wonderful because they shut out the surrounding civilization, which enhances the illusion of wilderness. The steep faces of the gorge where we were are microclimates—one side, which faces the southerly sun, is mostly covered with deciduous trees, and the other side, which lives mostly in shadow, is covered with evergreens. (We learned this from an informational plaque at trailside—another sign that it wasn't actually wilderness.) The old dead trees fall downhill and point downward toward the river.

The place is almost primevally beautiful, though, a great scar in the crust of the earth. Snow-shrouded wilderness has a hushed quietude that's both familiar and strange. Encircling you, the steep rock walls seem both protective and foreboding.

A high percentage of the people we encountered had cameras. Only one couple were using a cellphone, to take a selfie of themselves in front of the falls (most of which was encased in ice). The rest seemed to have what I (perhaps quaintly) call "real cameras," including people with big FF DSLRs, tripods, and equipment-filled backpacks.

The fallen trees all point downhill

We stopped to talk to one energetic middle-aged woman who talked voluably about the photographic opportunities available. She was very nice, super-friendly, but her appraisal of the gorge and its visual gifts was not complimentary. The light was too flat; the blue sky, rare enough in winter, was not blue enough; "you have to avoid the contrails"; there's not enough color in winter; and so on. I was struck by the extent to which she was experiencing the gorge in terms of the pictures she could get, and the place itself could either win approval or disapproval based on its yield, as a mining company might appraise a mine.

Scenic photography sometimes seems to me to refer to itself more than it does to the actual places photographed. It's almost like the places themselves are no longer experienced for what they are, but are reduced to their status as photo opportunities.

Of course the flip side of that coin is the way that practicing scenic photography can enhance our experience of land and landscape, and of the natural world, by sharpening our seeing and enhancing our powers of observation.

Don't impute any judgement to this statement, please, but I'm not a "scenic" photographer. I think the reason is because I'm almost always interested in the specific rather than the generic. There needs to be some kind of information in pictures to attract my interest. And then I want to know the significance of the information. So the world's prettiest picture of fall foliage doesn't do much for me if the meaning of the picture is merely "the colors of autumn leaves are beautiful." This impairs my enjoment of scenic photography—in scenic photography, information isn't the point, beauty is. If you're looking for meaning and informational content, a lot of scenic photography is inherently disappointing.

And the flip side of that is that many photographs that are overflowing with meaning and informational content aren't beautiful. So if if you come to those pictures mainly looking for beauty, you'll probably be disappointed.

There are two ways I learned I wasn't a scenic photographer. One is that scenes (and I do take scenics, of course—everybody does) mean much more to me if the place itself means something to me. The second is because the lack of integration between the experience of being in a dramatic place and seeing it diminished, flattened, and framed as a photograph is too great. (What I was talking about in the "Souvenir Sunset" post.)

The exception is when I'll never be able to see a place myself—an Alpine mountaintop, the surface of the moon, a deep cave, a "hot" military action—then, a photograph is a great aid to the imagination.

The most superficial disappointment for me when I look at scenic photography is that I find myself always wanting to know where it was taken, so I can add to my store of knowledge about the visual world. I want to know what I'm looking at. I usually want to know the who-what-when-where-why-how—whereas the scenic photographer is trying to show you the timeless, the classic, the Universalized (which is a more positive way of saying generic, generalized, imprecise). You probably share this need if you've read up to this point in this post and you're feeling frustrated wondering which gorge, where?!?

So I'm off the hook in places like the gorge. I took a bunch of pictures but I'm not after scenics, so I'm free to experience the place without concerning myself about the contrails in the insufficiently-blue sky. I'm in pure tourist mode, taking a few snaps as mementos.

Rifts of windblown snow clinging to the rock walls

It's places like that when I do kinda wish I were a scenic photographer, though. It really was beautiful. I'm sure there are ways to capture its grandeur and wonder that are beyond me.

Mike
(Thanks to S.)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Moose (very partial comment): "Ram Dass succinctly summed up a great deal of spiritual advice from millennia, 'Be here now.' Good advice for the photographer, too."

James Sinks (also a very partial comment): "The great failing of 'scenic' photography is the lack of meaning, I think. It's all aesthetics, with no intellectual or emotional context to fill it out. I struggle with that myself."

[It's almost a travesty to whittle Moose's and James's thoughtful long comments down to just these little slivers. For the full text of all "partial comments," please see the full Comments Section. —Ed.]

Gordon Reynolds: "It was photographs of Yosemite Valley made by Carlton Watkins in the 19th century that led Congress to pass legislation protecting the area. Were they scenic?"

Mike replies: Note that I was very careful not to denigrate scenic photography. It's not my thing, is all. I have no problem at all if it is someone else's thing. But I would say it was the documentary nature of Watkins's photographs that gave them their power, and their specificity, their link to that very distinctive region.

Dave Jenkins: "So, is this the editorial 'we' Mike, or were 'we' accompanied on our walk by a significant other?"

Mike replies: The S.O. is an S.M. (significant motivator) when it comes to getting the editorial us off our editorial butts. She's wonderful. To give you an idea, I was running* laps this morning at 5:30 a.m. If that's not love....

*Okay, jogging. But I carry around an extra 35 lbs., so I gave myself extra credit.

Geoff Wittig: "There certainly can be a straight-jacket aesthetic for traditional scenic photographs, and I can see how it can seem very formulaic if such images don't 'sing' for you. Traditional West Coast large format black and white nature photography à la Ansel Adams certainly had a very narrow aesthetic range. When I started shooting, the rigid limitations of color slide film basically put photographers in a box. You really needed to shoot in low contrast light, ideally bright overcast for fall color, or in the last 15 minutes before sunset, to keep within the contrast range of the film. The 'Velvia aesthetic' of super-saturated color and high contrast dominated landscape images for years.

"For me, it's not really about trying to cram the scene in front of me into the aesthetic box my capture/processing/print workflow dictates. Instead, it's about trying to compellingly and honestly capture a perfect little moment in nature as a beautiful print that lets other people experience what I experienced. And in turn, the more time I'm out hiking with my tripod and (big, heavy) camera trying to capture such a wonderful moment, the more such moments I get to experience. Kind of a win/win."

An aspect of blog editing that I seldom talk about is what I call "energy." Certain topics take on energy, and certain topics don't; in managing the flow of conversation, the editor has to be sensitive to what people want to talk about. Some conversations get very animated, and excerpting those conversations for the "Featured Comments" gets very interesting, often more interesting than the original postings. For other posts, the Commentariat is just bored or fidgety, or (worse) negative. In those cases, it's best to move right on.

To my surprise, the conversation about my "snow" pictures from yesterday has taken on quite a bit of energy in the comments. People have had very useful things to say about them, especially the second image, both technically and aesthetically. I was going to post the "Product of the Year 2014" today, but the snow picture discussion has taken on energy. So, let it flow; the PotY can wait.

Elisabeth Spector's comment, most notably, puts me in mind of what's best about art schools. The basic method for understanding art-in-progress, working methods, and the aesthetics of created work is the "critique": students put work up in front of the group and the teachers moderate a discussion about it. The student, as the artist/creator, gets to be informed about his or her own work as he or she wishes, of course—but seldom in a good critique does the creator of the work fail to gain further insights about the piece and how it's working for people.

What I'll do when I print that snowfield image is to understand how I want it to work onscreen first, and then get as close as I can in a print; then I'd put the print up on the viewing board and look at it for a few days.

In the process of looking, one of a number of things might happen—the basic evolution being that I'd come to like the image more or less. Some pictures you think have a lot of promise fall away after a few days—you stop caring. It's like music that you can listen to a few times that then becomes boring. Other images have more sustained power, and your appreciation of them actually deepens with time (this is a lesson that Paul Caponigro's pictures taught me back in the '80s when I was starting out). 

But on a more practical level, living with and looking at the print for a few days will help clarify the direction you want to take it. Beyond the purely technical considerations, you'll gradually get settled about how you want the finished print to "feel," not so much in its appeal to the eye (although there is that), but in its emotional feeling-tone or intellectual fascination.

With most pictures, there will be a variety of different interpretations—different ways you could go with it. ElArteDePerder suggests a graphic, formalized interpretation; Elisabeth explains why she doesn't like that approach. That's where your own personal response comes in, and it's why you need confidence in your own taste and your own aims in order to work as an artist. You need to give yourself permission to go your own way and do your own thing. This is especially difficult sometimes when you have a picture that you know might appeal more immediately to more people if you went a different direction with it. "Selling out" like that doesn't work in the long run, however—it just results in conformist, pandering pictures with superficial appeal and no deep integrity. One big distinction between art photography and other photography is that you don't give the audience what they want, you lead them to see and understand (over the course of many pictures) what you want. You can't do that unless you're being true to yourself.

In the critique, the teacher might provide the response, or simply sit back and let the class talk; more often, it's some skillful blending of the two—the teacher is a moderator, guiding the discussion and helping it along when it starts to lag but not dominating the discussion or insisting on one "correct" viewpoint.

Where I went to school, critiques were led by not one but two teachers, and often they were teachers who didn't always see eye to eye. The student (or photographer) him- or herself has to be the final arbiter, and there's no better way to "get" that than to be in the presence of two authority figures who disagree. At the very basic level—and this indeed happened when I was in school—you have one teacher saying he loves a photograph, and the other saying she hates it, and the two of them argue. If it's your picture they're arguing over, that will really focus your own feelings about whether you want to defend it or let it go.

Of everything I've left behind in photography over the years, I think I miss critiques the most.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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John Gillooly: "Did a workshop with Jay Maisel a couple years back and the 'critique' was by far the greatest and most value part of each day. Sometimes just walking in the room and seeing the image(s) that you selected for the critique was a lesson unto itself. Your own critique of yourself might sharpen at that moment. 'That image shouldn't have made the cut' or 'I think this image will hold up.' I loved that daily process and miss it. There seems to be no online equivalent of a good critique?"

Richard Newman: "I have a problem with critiques. And not specifically re my photos. Its the competence of the critics to critique—or lack of it. Not only with amateur photographers, but some who photograph for a living. Evidently doing it doesn't necessarily mean you can be a good critic. I have seen some egregiously dumb critiques, where the critic didn't understand the technical aspects, but criticized them, or just spouted inanities and aesthetic platitudes, usually clearly wrong. Yes, there are good critics out there, but finding them outside schools—or even in them—seems to be a crapshoot. Good criticism is a skill that requires both technical and aesthetic knowledge, and the ability to understand how to apply them to a given photo. My experience with amateur club critiques has not been good. The one group where I felt the critical level was high consisted mostly of commercial/industrial photographers and art directors, with a bias towards how well the image supported the product. It would be nice if there were more groups like that (bias aside) where knowledgeable commenters could be found."

Mike replies: I do think it depends on the capabilities of the teacher(s). My experience with unmoderated groups hasn't been good, and, ironically perhaps, guest speakers at gatherings don't seem to be particularly good at running critiques—the guests tend to want to be complimentary to their hosts. My sample size on that isn't the best, but it includes situations where I myself was the guest speaker! There's a reluctance to risk hurting peoples' feelings when you're a one-time guest and don't know the personalities of the participants.

Richard Skoonberg: "I attend a monthly crit here in Atlanta at the Atlanta Photography Group. It is such fun. It is led by Chip Simone, who was a student of Harry Callahan and is a wonderful, accomplished artist and teacher in his own right. The conversations are always interesting and opinions go flying. In this group, people are all attempting to create art and explore what that art-making with a camera is all about. Chip does a great job moderating and I am always learning something. Every time you put your prints up in front of thirty or more people, it is a bit intimidating. But I have found it builds confidence.

"I have also learned a lot about printing. I have been shooting for the computer so long that I had really forgotten what a precious object a beautiful print can be. I really feel that I am growing from this experience. I count myself lucky. One more thing—at these crits, people never, ever discuss gear."

Jernej: "Don't know about your days as a student or as a teacher, but in our case it's nearly impossible to get more than 'I like it' or 'everything was fine' out of the students. No why, no how...nothing. In 95% of cases it seems explaining why they (don't) like something is as painful as giving birth.

"I can understand why they don't want to hurt someone by saying it's crap work (even when you can see it in every face in the classroom) but why is it so hard for them to say what they like about the results? Why is it so hard for them to point out a very obvious mistake that could be easily fixed (like a bunch of typos in the title sequence of a documentary or a mistimed cut between two clips)? Must be a cultural thing...."

Test shot converted from a Fuji X-trans file

Digital took black-and-white away.

To me it's the biggest change about the Digital Transition (which I define as 1994–2011). "Black and white are the colors of photography," said Robert Frank. That "are" would now have to be changed to "were."

I've made the point many times that for some of us—those of us who approach working with a camera by learning to see the way the camera and lens sees—being able to convert a color file to B&W is not the same thing as having a camera that only shoots B&W. If the camera natively shoots color, I see in color. Can't help it. People who look at it like it's only a technical question can't see the point in a B&W-only camera; they'd just convert the file. They don't get it: we see with our brains, and if the way you conceive of making pictures is to adapt your brain to the way the camera and lens are recording the image, then you'll only "see" in B&W if that's what your camera is seeing. So for a long time I agitated for dedicated B&W camera, saying I'd buy one when someone made it.

Then someone did...Leica. Leica was a slightly more expensive brand of camera in the marketplace when I got into photography, costing a modest 10 to 30% more than similar Nikon equipment. Now, Leicas are Veblen goods marketed mainly to the carriage trade and cost many multiples of what similar equipment costs.

The 23mm ƒ/2 lens for the Leica T, for example, is made (or was originally made; maybe Leica has brought it in-house now) by a no-name Pacific Rim OEM supplier, but Leica charges $1,950 for it. If the very same lens—no magic added or subtracted by mystical means—were marketed by Sigma or Tamron, it would cost 1/10th that much.

If a digital B&W-only camera were marketed by Canon or Fuji, it would cost $795. Leica charges $7,950 for the M Monochrom, thus making a liar out of me. I wouldn't buy one, turns out.

I've also been searching for years for a way to make digital B&W look good. It usually doesn't. There are two main reasons for that, first that the technology wasn't good enough, and second, that most people don't have good judgment about tone.

But it's been getting better and better. The first good B&W print I made was shot with the Nikon D700; the first digital B&W print of my work that looked better than a film-on-fiber-base print was the print Ctein made of my photograph "Hands." (Yes, it didn't look quite like film. No, the shadow separation wasn't as good.)

Anyway, I just wanted to report that I am officially resigning from the fray, hanging up my gadfly badge, not gonna complain any more. I've decided that Fuji X-trans files convert well enough, and that I'm going to go ahead and accept the new order: that digital cameras record color, and color photography is the new normal. The shift has happened: black and white are no longer the colors of photography.

Of course, I'm going to continue to make B&W pictures myself, for the simple reason that I like B&W better. It's more expressive to me and I respond (viscerally, elementally, at an emotional level) to tones more than I do to colors. (Always have. Seems to be the way I'm wired. Although of course I can appreciate color photography, my own and others'.)

And Fuji conversions aren't perfect. They don't quite look like film-on-fiber-base. They're...different. A little better in some ways, a little worse in others. But I have officially decided that they're good enough for me.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

It's either one or the other

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Featured Comments from:

Clayton Jones: "By early 2004 I had completed my transition to digital after having shot Tri-X for over 20 years in 4x5, 6x7 and 35mm. For two years I struggled with trying to make my pictures have 'the Tri-X look.' I tried many photoshop tricks and various software solutions that claimed to be able to produce that look. Nothing worked and I was constantly frustrated.

"Finally one day I came to the realization that I was suffering needlessly. Digital B&W had its own form of beauty and I needed to let go of the past and tune into the new. My frustration vanished, my pictures got better, and I began to see the inherent beauty in this new medium. And now I'm in the process of living happily ever after.

"I love the B&W prints I'm making (with the Epson R3000 on Hot Press Natural) and my long time love for B&W photography is as strong as ever. I love working in Photoshop and you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming back to film. I'll always remember how hard it was to let go and what a huge difference it made when I did."

Joe Holmes: "Re 'If the camera natively shoots color, I see in color. Can't help it.'

"Absolutely.

"One day walking down the street a couple years ago, I spotted a scene I wanted to shoot. So I lifted the camera to my eye and suddenly had a dizzying moment of disorientation. I had been walking along as usual looking at the world through the mental filter of the lens that's typically on my camera—but I'd put a different lens on as I walked out the door, and I'd forgotten about it.

"That was moment I realized that I often walk around in mental-camera mode, framing the world as I'm able to shoot it. When my camera is on my hip, it does me no good to look at the world in a way I can't shoot. I stop seeing other modes when mentally framing.

"Though I love B&W, I haven't shot it for probably 25 years, but I know it's the same. If I carried a B&W-only camera, that's how I'd be framing the world—but not otherwise."

Gingerbaker: "If you could turn off the color saturation of the Fuji electronic viewfinder, would you do it?"

Mike replies: No. I don't have any need to have the camera make the conversion for me. I'm very used to translating the real world to B&W in my head. My problem is that when I know the camera records color, then I anticipate that. When it records B&W, then I anticipate that.

John Krumm: "After over a month of shooting almost all digital black and white (seeing black and white in the viewfinder, importing with a black and white preset) it feels like my brain has changed. Every once in a while I will see a shot, maybe one out of one hundred, that I think might look good in color, so Ill shoot it for that purpose. At the very least, my impression is that I'm becoming a more discriminating color photographer. If I change a photo to color, my usual reaction now is "yuck" and I quckly change it back. It's a strange thing."

marcin wuu: "What I find interesting in this (and previous) posts about black-and-white photography is, how these shots really aren't. They're actually dark gray and light gray. Noticeably the black is absent. It's like there's something inherently wrong with the colour (or actually, lack of it) black. They're smooth and have lots of detail and fine transitions from darktones to light, but no real punch—like they follow a rule of no contrast. Why is it so?"

Mike replies: Because that's what I like. Look at Henry Wessel's prints—they're less contrasty than mine. Look at Ralph Gibson's prints for a counterexample: virtually every one of his pictures has strong blacks. Most black-and-white photographers (the ones who do their own printing) have their own taste, their own aesthetic. Black-and-white allows for a very wide range of interpretation.

For instance, here's an alternate interpretation. I'm not saying this is worse, but it's different. Some people might like it; to me, it's coarse and crude. I don't like it. Since it's my pic, of course, I get to decide.

Bruce Robbins: "Well done, Mike. I'm pleased you've found a way of shooting and enjoying black and white again. I'm sticking with film but not because I think it offers better quality than digital. I just prefer the whole process of shooting with film, from choosing the right film, loading the camera, not having an LCD to bother about, to developing the film and making a print in the darkroom. For most digital shooters, these seem to be inconveniences, but for me and my band of blog readers we'll never give them up. LONG LIVE FILM!"

Our favorite blustery hidebound conservative critic is at it again.

Mr. Jones needs to take an introductory college-level course in logic...or his readers do. The argument he's constructed is called a "straw man argument":

A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent's argument. To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument.

The so-called typical "attacking a straw man" argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and then to refute or defeat that false argument ("knock down a straw man") instead of the original proposition. (Wikipedia)

Here's what Mr. Jones says:

Photography is not an art [...] The news that landscape photographer Peter Lik has sold his picture Phantom for $6.5m (£4.1m), setting a new record for the most expensive photograph of all time, will be widely taken as proof to the contrary. In our world where money talks, the absurd inflated price that has been paid by some fool for this “fine art photograph” will be hailed as proof that photography has arrived as art.

Here's what I could say, to highlight the poverty of his argument:

The highest grossing films in America in 2013 were "The Hunger Games" and "Frozen." In our world where money talks, this will be hailed as proof that film has arrived as art.

To begin with: no, it won't be. "Will be widely taken as proof"? "Will be hailed"? Oh really? By whom, and where, exactly? Stand up that straw man nice and pretty now. The only person who is claiming Peter Lik's good fortune has anything to do with an antiquated hundred-year-old argument about some definition of "art" is our blowsy critic himself.

In fact, the whole issue is a straw man. Nobody's talking about whether photography is an art. Nobody cares. It's not only a steam-engined passenger train that has left the station, but many people don't even travel by train any more. As (I'm told) they say in his native land, Critic Jones is a "wind-up merchant":

Mainly UK, especially south-east England. (v) To use information (true or fictional) to provoke, tease or deceive. (Urban Dictionary)

You know what I say: photography isn't art—but then, art isn't photography, either. Most intelligent people understand what photography is and isn't. Photography is photography, and you either get it or you don't. And it's about to turn 2015, not 1915.

Mike
(Thanks to David Boyce and Richard Tugwell)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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Andrew C E: "Jonathan Jones has backpedaled quite a lot from just last year, when he proclaimed that 'photography is the serious art of our time.' I think "wind-up merchant" may be an apt description."

Dave in NM: "Art or not art, who cares? What I'd like to know is, how does a guy go from selling decorative wall art (framed or unframed—don’t forget to enter your coupon code) to a $6.5 million photo? If Thomas Kinkade were still alive, he’d be very jealous."

B Grace: "In all fairness, Mr. Jones isn't a writer but he does use nice word-processing software."

B. R. George: "I'm surprised you dignified that column with this thoughtful of a response. But I do sort of think that photography might benefit from an unofficial moratorium on Antelope Canyon."

Mike replies: I've been saying since the '90s that the only person who should be allowed to photograph slot canyons is Bruce Barnbaum, who did it first.

Rob: "With regard to whether photography is or is not art, there’s a quote from Alfred Stieglitz* that I remember from college, which I think goes the the heart of the question: 'I like some paintings more than most photographs. I like some photographs more than most paintings.' Boom boom, case closed. Any further discussion is just the rear guard actions of lost soldiers in a lost war, like the Japanese who hid in caves on Pacific islands for years after the end of WWII.

"(*I probably should say 'attributed to Alfred Stieglitz,' because I’ve been unable to turn up that quote again. It’s not in any of the textbooks I kept from college; my college photo professor doesn’t remember it; and even Google can’t find it. So if anyone amongst the TOP readership can source it for me, I’d greatly appreciate it.)"

I love tones. I sometimes convert pictures to B&W just for fun, as a way of relaxing, like other people play "Angry Birds."

Contemplating Henry Wessel recently, I was mulling over the change in B&W printing styles in my lifetime.

It's impossible for us to see, now, how radical Ansel Adams was when he reached his mature style. It was like he'd slid the "Structure" slider* to 11. His contemporaries could barely believe it.

Now, he looks normal or on the mild side of normal.

Tones of gray, I think, are analogous to tones experienced in sound reproduction equipment. It's well known that in deconstructing audiophile tastes in sound quality, some people prefer the middle tones and some people gravitate to the extremes. "Soot and chalk," is how Adams denigrated excessive contrast. "Boom and sizzle" is the direct audiophile equivalent, a phrase that denigrates loudspeakers that push all the musical tones to the extremes of bass and treble.

Not every B&W photograph has to have "black blacks and white whites." (The English term "monochrome" might be useful here, because it doesn't have the idea of including the extremes built into the name. Although it might err in the opposite direction if you conflate the word (which means "one color") with "monotone" (which means "a sound unchanging in pitch and without intonation").

Here's a picture of Butters that doesn't contain any white tones:

(You've probably been a B&W printer if you looked at this and immediately thought, "except for the highlights in the eyes.")

I'm a midtones guy myself. I don't just like B&W, I like grays. Specific tones of gray and how they relate to other tones near them are what make B&W prints "sing."

(It's why the print is the true medium for B&W photographs. The tonal placement in prints can be precise, although they can look different under incorrect lighting.)

I don't think I got this conversion quite right. I'll look at it a few times today and then try again.

Mike

P.S. Is it just me, or do Fuji X-trans files convert to B&W particularly well? Has anyone else noticed that? (The two photos above weren't taken with a Fuji, though, they were taken with the E-M1.)

*A local contrast enhancing slider in Nik SilverEfex 2.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Gray areas

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Gordon: "The one photographer whose prints always gave/give me goosebumps for their delicacy and beauty is Frederick Sommer, who seemed to ply his trade mainly in zones V, VI, and VII. Ignoring what you might think of his subject matter, I can't think of anyone who could coax more glowing beauty out of a black and white photograph than he did."

Huw Morgan: "This is a subject that fascinates me a lot and I tend to flip and flop on high contrast versus low depending on the last photography show that I saw.

"For example, a couple of years ago, I saw a show of Robert Mapplethorpe photos. These exhibited the blackest blacks and the whitest whites I've ever seen. The prints had a huge 'presence,' like listening to Wagner on full-range floor speakers with the volume turned up to 11. However, I couldn't afford the prints ($10,000 and up), so I have no idea if they would lead to visual fatigue with exposure over time.

"On the other extreme, I have a book by one of my favorite photographers, James Ravilious, who worked for many years in a remote corner of England taking subtle, gentle photographs of a vanishing country life. Ravilious took many of his photographs through a yellow filter to create prints with a silvery gray appearance, almost like infrared photography. There are virtually no extreme blacks and whites in his prints. Whenever I feel particularly harried or stressed, I like to take out the Ravilious book and lose myself in the gentle English countryside replete with sheep and cows. This would be the musical equivalent of putting on a vinyl recording of a Satie composition.

"Perhaps the key to my internal debate is that there is room for both Wagner and Satie in the musical universe and the personal listening choice between them is dependent on mood and taste. I'm more inclined to produce images on the Ravilious end of the spectrum, but that's probably because I'm older now and more appreciative of subtlety in everything—wine, music and art."

The title of the post is the name of one of the presentations at the BPB14, the current Brighton Photo Biennial.

Ought to be the name of a category. There's nothing wrong with making money not art, but I've always been a little uneasy about conflations of the two. A commercial photographer once showed me some alarmingly dreadful photographs mimicking Vermeer paintings and asked me, "Can you guess who my inspiration was?" You can't be in photography and mind bad pictures--anyone can do whatever he or she wants to do--but that comment...no. Imitation isn't inspiration. An art photography show at the Corcoran Museum once included Bruce Weber, the then-super-hot fashion photographer. Weber's work should have had a disclaimer attached--"for making money."

I've always felt--perhaps have only imagined--that it's not that hard to detect the impulse behind any kind of work--meaning, how the person or persons who made it felt about it and what they meant it for. Sometimes I think it's almost where I start when I come to new work. If you can't trust the impulse, how can you trust the pictures? At the very least, speaking just for myself, I need to know that the creator has some cognizance, some respect, for the truth behind appearances. Work made to make money almost never does, and that's just not all that difficult to see.

Mike, getting better at typing on the iPad

Addendum: I'm not saying here that there's anything wrong with moneymaking photography. Actually I have a lot of admiration for that. It takes a lot of dedication and intelligence and skill and knowledge and yes, talent! I can't say that one kind of photography is better than another. I really don't think it is. There's surely as much bad and cynical and pretentious art photography as there is any other kind. But I like to know – or get a feeling for – what I think the photographer was up to. What he or she was doing. What the aim was. What the concern was, or what the photographer was after. I think you can sense these things when you look at the work. Sometimes you're not clear about it right away, but if you think about it a little, sometimes you can figure it out.

How about the only thing I can say for sure is that dictating into the iPad is not the right way to investigate the matter! I feel like I'm tapping out Morse code on the concrete wall of a prison cell. :-) maybe I'll undertake to write more about this when I'm back home behind my beloved Microsoft ergonomic keyboard.

Elisabeth Spector wrote an excellent response yesterday to DD-B's post about the evolution of the Lincoln Memorial print. Since then, several people have "piled on" and agreed with her that they don't like some of the changes Ctein and DD-B made to the picture. (I do, but that's beside the point.)

What I think might be getting overlooked is what is explicit in the rest of DD-B's post: he worked with his printer (and friend—Ctein) to get the result he wanted. He describes this process in some detail. And he succeeded—that is, he did get what he wanted—as you can read right there in English at the end of the post, where he says the print is "certainly the finest rendering of the image I've ever seen!"

This is a great example of what I mean when I say (as I often do) "you've got to take mature artists  at their word." (And by "artists" I just mean creators of artworks—that term "artist" is so loaded.) What that means is, once you've determined that the creator of a work of art or craft is skilled, competent, and practiced enough to actually achieve what they're after, then you really can't argue with their choices. It's their work. They get to decide.

There are, naturally, a few things you do get to decide. You get to decide whether you like that artist or not, of course. If their choices consistently bug you or detract from your experience of the work, then maybe you just don't sync well with that person and his or her work isn't for you. (plenty of artists are like that for me.) You can also learn from another creator's choices—this is what Elisabeth is describing she went through. She's clarified her own feelings about what she would have done differently if David's picture had been hers. That's important.

I think you can learn from other creators (you'll notice I'm avoiding that "artist" word) in both a positive or a negative way. Both are equally valid. You can admire someone and want to emulate their work—model yourself or your approach on them; you can also intentionally reject another creator's choices and resolve to avoid them.

Either one can be important to your own work. Many times, encountering an artist who is very clear about his or her own artistic strategies can have the effect of "forcing" you to deal with it and arrive at your own conclusion, either as a creator yourself or as a critical viewer and appreciator of work. A few "fer instances": Andreas Gursky Photoshops his work as part of his creative process. Positive or negative for you? (Don't answer these questions to me—I'm not asking, I'm suggesting that these questions are what you should ask yourself.) There's a photojournalist I've written about (forgot the name!) who uses heavily oversaturated colors. That might drive you to consider color saturation in your own work, pro or con. Ralph Eugene Meatyard places a sense of surrealism front and center in his work. Accept or reject? Ditto Joel-Peter Witkin's necrophilia. Studying the work of Gregory Crewdson for any length of time will bring you face to face with the directorial mode of staging scenes deliberately and extensively in order to photograph them. Interest you, or turn you off? And so on. I could go on all day.

But back to the subject. While I think "I would have done it differently" is a good learning and self-testing and self-clarifying tool, at the same time I don't think "he should have done it differently" is a very mature critical stance. Do you see the distinction?

(I've been "immature" that way myself, lest you think I'm casting stones. For instance, note my "uncolorizing" of John Moore's famous picture here. You have to scroll down a bit. Bad Mike. Not your picture, not your right.)

Maturity as a viewer and appreciator of photography or any other art starts to come when we give artists enough credit to believe their choices are deliberate, and we can both give them room for their own intentions and also respect their right to shape their own work into what they want it to be. Only then can we really start to work out whether their art can speak to us or not. I don't like Bruce Gilden's methods or his use of flash (I generally dislike flash) but his work is genuine and it convinces me. Adam Fuss's composition and concerns are about as far from mine as they can get, but I still really like his work because he has let me see its coherence and unity.

So learn from DD-B's choices or not, either pro (like the changes) or con (don't like the changes). But agree with them or not—doesn't affect him. His picture, he's the one who gets to say.

Mike
(Thanks to Elisabeth)

Print Sale printer and admin Ctein adds: First, I want to remind everyone that I always run these sales on a customer-satisfaction-guaranteed basis. If you really don't like the photograph after you buy it, you can return it and I'll refund your money. This does not happen often, but it does happen. So, if seeing the "before" and "after" versions has put some doubts in your mind about how much you'll like the "after" version, I'd encourage you to go ahead and buy the print. I will bet, with some degree of confidence, that you will like it a lot better when you see the print than you think.

Now, I'm not going to argue with anyone's aesthetic judgments because a.) it's not my place and b.) as Mike said in this post, DD-B, as the creating artist, is the ultimate arbiter of the right way to print this photograph. So far as I'm concerned, this is a fascinating intellectual debate of photographic aesthetics and I'm enjoying it immensely, but it's one in which we have no standing.

Having said that, there's a couple of things going on here that do distort people's judgments. First, remember that you're looking at an on-screen JPEG; the actual print presents tones and total placement considerably differently. The print looks substantially more dramatic than the JPEG. This does interfere with judging the relative impact of the before and after versions. Not saying it would necessarily change anyone's opinion, but the limitations of web presentation mean that we are all "viewing through a glass, darkly."

There is another kind of illusion going on: the web version of the finished photograph looks distorted to me. It looks squat and flat (I mean that geometrically). When I look at the print, it looks taller and narrower, so the sense of verticality in the print is much closer to the way the JPEG of the drum scan looks as it's represented in DD-B's column.

The impression is so compelling that I took out a ruler and measured the proportions of the screen image and the print, because I was certain that some kind of distortion had occurred to make the image more squat in posting it online. It's not! It is entirely an illusion. The proportions are exactly the same—it just looks wrong.

Ain't that weird and interesting?

For what it's worth, I don't get the same distorted impressions when I look at the web image at the top of the original Sale article, so you're not seeing a misrepresentation of the photograph there. I'm positive it's one of those geometrical illusions, maybe something like the patterns that make parallel lines look like they're diverging when they're not or vice versa. Something about having those two images in juxtaposition on the webpage. (I'm arm-waving—I really don't know why.)

Anyways, it's a reminder that we always have to be careful judging a photograph, especially a print, from an online image.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Bob Smith: "I also prefer the original drum scan. The perspective feels more like what you experience when you see the memorial in person. Like it is towering over you. The corrected image seems a little too squared away and not as natural. Regardless, after living in D.C. for thirty years I was without one single photo of D.C. hanging on the wall. Well I'll have one now as soon as this photo arrives. I still like it and it is outside the norm of available shots of D.C. available. Or taken by myself."

ben ng: "I love Elisabeth's comments, as well as Kenneth's. I never show any image other than the finished product. I also never have a printer [printmaker], even one of Ctein's abilities.I don't believe in having someone else print, or 'realise,' as I call it, my pictures. I am the only one capable of it. I really make the print for my own needs and satisfaction, and if others like it, they buy it with nothing else to compare it to. This seems to be the only site where discussions like this take place...wonderful!"

David Dyer-Bennet responds to all the comments generally: I should say, in case it's not obvious, that disagreeing with my decisions is completely and totally okay—in fact it's required; if everybody agrees with me there's something wrong. The kind of disagreement we're seeing here, where people explain how different versions affect them and why they like one better than another, is the best kind of productive discussion. No idea if I'd have thought of removing the ladder. It's possible I'd have said "I wish we could make that go away," even if I didn't know how (then). Seeing it gone, I liked it better. Consistently, the people preferring a different approach are just not going for my idea of strict formality contrasting with the two workers casually standing there. The perspective correction, the ladder, and the cropping all tie back to that same thing, it seems to me. So the ladder (removing it) fits right in with the rest of my choices in printing this, to me.

MikeR: "I am absolutely delighted by the thoughtful and articulate (and polite) discussion this print has provoked, because I am learning so much from it. Thank you to everyone who commented.

"My wife's preference shared the Elisabeth Spector viewpoint, mine the DD-B/Ctein. We had our own discussion about the print, the original image, and the validity of the creator's intentions. A then-and-now contrast: when she shot a Nikon F2, she prided herself in all composition being in-camera, and no manipulation in printing. Today, a Photoshop geek, she abstracts and colorizes her images in a way that reminds me of Matisse. Different tools, different vision?

"Since I have a number of negatives that have frustrated me in the darkroom, I purchased this print to give me a reference point for what can be done by a really, really good printer (Ctein). These discussions, in which Ctein himself has taken part, provide a significant and unexpected bonus, both in technique, and in viewpoint."

"Did I say thank you?"

Something the previous post brings to mind—generally, in photography, any technical flaw can potentially be used for artistic expression.

(Just sayin'.)

Mike

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Jimmy Reina: "When I was in school, my professor put my (accidental) double exposure in the end of year student show, and it won first prize. In that instance, my real skill was as an editor—even a mistake can have good composition."

Dennis: "A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place."

Leslie Quagraine: "We self-built our family home. Anything that came out a bit wonky, my wife dubbed a 'feature.' Long live features in the creative process."