On Photography

I've been thinking a lot about what the heck I'm doing with my photography lately. Someone I know thinks I should sell my stuff on his or her website, but I'm nowhere near ready yet. In the five years I've been shooting I've amassed maybe 12-18 "keepers", but have yet to take a picture I'd call a "show-er". Sometimes I rather despair that I'll ever take a picture of real merit. The other day though, my latest issue of LensWork came, and in it there was an editorial by some guy named Brooks Jensen:

We photograph nostalgia so that we can remember; abstracts so we can play with the patterns in our visual mind; flowers so we can marvel at the wonders of creation. These are worthy, soaring pursuits, even if our results remain grounded and somewhat pedestrian.

If I've ever given an "amen" in my life, that surely earned it!

The article came into my lap the same day I bought an adapter so I could mount my 4x5 camera onto my my tripod. Sadly, the little Bogen ball-head on my wooden tripod isn't up to holding a Cambo Legend, so I had to put it on my little aluminum Manfrotto tripod, which has a panning head that's just fine, but the tripod isn't up to the job. But I decided to risk it anyway, and went shooting on Sunday. As I shot, I was thinking the whole time about what makes a picture worth taking. Most of my friends think I'm a cracker-jack photographer, but I've done enough of my homework to know I'm only approaching basic competancy (not there yet). Like I said, no "show-ers" yet.

The first stage of competancy with a photograph is whether or not it is correct. Sadly, I am seeing more and more product photography in magazines where my first impression isn't the composition or the lighting, but "it's out of focus!" (I wonder if the trend towards digital has put more photogs onto auto-everything cameras that aren't so friendly to manual focussing as the older ones. Autofocus lenses have much shorter "throw" than traditional manual lenses, so getting critically sharp focus is often much harder with them.) To be considered correct, the photograph must be free from error. This means:

• Everything that's supposed to be in focus is in focus,
• The exposure must include everything in the frame (special effects like sunset silhouettes exempted),
• No branches sticking out of people's heads or other errors of composition.

This is a paltry list, though. Not so much something to aspire to as something to be ashamed of when it happens. If, as a snapshooter catching memories, one of these flaws surfaces, no biggie. But for an aspiring artist to commit one of these errors is to show that one simply wasn't paying attention to what one was doing. That'd be like a professional boxer not keeping his elbows down -- a neophyte like myself must suffer the inevitable uppercut, but the pro-boxer would deserve it.

But what then does a would-be artist aspire to when making photographs? So far as I can see, photographs worth taking accomplish one of the following:

1. Information -- The photograph informs us of something we should know, or reminds us of something that should not be forgotten. The classic photo of U.S. Marines raising the Stars and Bars over Mount Suribachi and that napalmed girl in Vietnam are two good examples. This is different than "archiving an experience" as I do snapshotting with my belt-camera.
   
2. Esthetics -- The photograph should produce a pleasing image, regardless of whether the photo has any figurative content. Still-lifes of flowers and most of Ansel Adams's landscapes fall into this category (sunset beaches generally do not -- a beautiful subject and a beautiful image are two different things).
3. Emotion -- The photograph brings about an emotional reaction in the viewer, be it awe, mystery, lust, chagrin or empathy, here the point is to be moved, to have some part of your being touched and shared through the silver halide.
   

My working hypothesis is that a nice photograph will succeed in one of these, a good photograph must succeed in at least two conditions, and that no great photograph fails to succeed in all criteria. Maybe I'll see things differently in another five years, but for now that's my $0.02 and I'm sticking with it.