Tag: photography

Image vs. Print

This question bugged me for a while: is an image an ultimate goal and result of creativity or execution and presentation are important as well? And I came to conclusion that execution and presentation are important.

Let’s talk about paintings for example. I think of paintings not only as two dimensional images. There is a third dimension – brush strokes. They capture artist hand motion and his emotions as much as color, composition or subject. When I look at those strokes I can imagine how the artist hand was moving, and that passes artist emotions to me. The brush strokes can be powerful, forceful, angry or they can be casual, light and soft. A reproduction of a painting can have accurate representation of an image but does not capture the brush strokes as well and in some sense erasing that third dimension.

I grew up in a fairly provincial town seeing only reproductions of paintings in books. Seeing them later in museums changed my perception of them completely. I remember how seeing one of van Gogh’s self-portraits in Seattle Art Museum (in a temporary exhibition) made unforgettable impression on me. Much of van Gogh’s face was not painted. Either skin-toned paper was used or paper was covered with skin-toned paint. And then on top of that van Gogh painted his beard, eyes, hair. It was like the face was already in that skin-toned paper, van Gogh just helped me to see it in a few brush strokes. No reproduction has been able to show that.

Now the paintbrush strokes can be meaningless too. For example, I have some cheap painting hanging in my house. It may have been produced by printing on canvas first and then laying paint on top to make it look like painting, the paintbrush strokes just random and “don’t fit”. That’s kind of example of good image bad painting. Another example of good image and good painting but where strokes don’t mean much [to me] is Pointillism which branched off Impressionism. In paintings that I’ve seen in museum executed with this technique application of dots looks very mechanical. While technique is interesting it did not give enough freedom to artist hand.

Same goes to photography but in photography it is a matter of technology and not directly related to us. Platinum-palladium print has incredible tonal range and looks like the image is in paper, where print from inkjet printer looks like image is coated on top of paper, like a polaroid emulsion transfer (in some sense). All that is left to us is to choose what matches what we want the best. And don’t get me even started on paper, I have ton of paper samples at home and I just enjoy looking at them and feeling their texture.

Is this important to most of people? No. Paintings are not much of importance either. And even famous ones. Have you been to Musée du Louvre and saw Mona Lisa? Have you looked at the crowd? How many people were looking at the painting and how many were actually with their backs toward the painting taking infamous “hey, I’m 10 feet from Mona Lisa painting” photo? And using flash despite all “no flash” signs? I like this statistic from Wikipedia: “Visitors generally spend about 15 seconds viewing the Mona Lisa.” Is it really worth only 15 seconds? (Granted it may have lost its value as painting and has become something else. Sadly.)

So what can we photographers do? We can do our best explaining this and teaching everyone to see this. Even if the rest think we are a bit crazy.

Demilitarization of Photography

I find it a bit disturbing the amount of military words used by photographers. Shoot instead of take picture. Shot instead of a photograph. Weapon of my choice instead of camera and lenses. Just today I’ve read interview of one photographer where while talking about his street photography he said “I keep my weapon close [referring to camera] ready to fire”. Why so much aggression? Aren’t we supposed to make our world better with our art?

I avoid those word in my language and use real photographic words when talking about photography. For me photography is a peaceful experience. Let’s declare photography a demilitarized zone. Are you with me?

I am an Amateur photographer!

History sometimes yields interesting facts. One of such is that a while back Amateur would be a compliment to a photographer. From French amateur "lover of", this meant a photographer who does photography for the love of it (as opposed to professional who does it for the money).

Henri Cartier-Bresson in his famous essay “The Decisive Moment” writes: “I still regard myself as an amateur: but a dilettante I certainly am not." Somehow over time amateur has become an equivalent of dilettante. So let’s restore its original meaning. And I’ll do it first by stating:

I’m an Amateur photographer because I’m doing photography for no other reason but the love of it.

1000, 2000, 2500000000, …

With so many photos produced every second is there any room left for photographers?

Facebook is the biggest photo sharing website with 2.5 billion photos uploaded monthly according to Facebook blog. That translates into roughly 1000 photos per second. Can you imagine that? 1 second – 1000 new photos uploaded, 2 seconds – 2000 new photos uploaded, …

Should photographers be worrying that soon any possible photograph will be captured and published? At first I thought it could be then I recalled the old theorem about monkey writing all plays by Shakespeare and an actual test. When University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts setup an experiment with real monkeys, the most they got was 3 pages of letter S.

The same happens in photography. With almost everyone possessing a camera we get a lot of me in front of something and here is something famous photos. In some sense most of 1000 photos uploaded every second are very repetitive kind of like printing the same letter with some variations. At the same time there are still very few photographs like this that is very much different kind of photography.

I hope I did not offend anyone with such comparison. That was not my point. I myself have a lot of family photographs in famous places. I very much enjoy sharing them with my family. My only point is that there is another kind of photography that is worth sharing with the world.

Being Yourself

I was learning photography from books. And a lot of what I did at the beginning I was decomposing photographs that were inspiring me, trying to repeat them and leaning from my mistake. This was extremely valuable and I have no problem suggesting this to anyone else. There is of cause a danger of getting stuck in repeating others.

At some point I felt a need to find my style and I got into a trap of trying to be different. I guess I had too much external influence telling me that to find my style I had to differentiate myself from others. I was continuously chasing after finding something that has not been done yet. All that produced to was a bunch of random photographs. All that was depressing as I was trying to photographs that could be different but not necessarily interested me.

It took me a while to figure out that the most important thing in photography – as probably in any other art – is to be true to yourself. You can try to be like someone else, you can try to be like nobody else or your can try to be yourself – the choice is yours. I prefer to be myself and it does not matter to me if what I photograph has been photographed before, if my image looks like something someone else did, or if it does not look like anything else (which is very unlikely given how many good photographers are out there in the world).

Low contrast

I’m always drawn to photographs with low contrast. They don’t immediately “pop” into your eyes. They slowly draw you in and ask to explore. This one from the last trip to Palouse drew me in:

Anticipation of StormAnticipation of Storm

It did not pop, I skipped it at first, but then I stepped back because there was something in it. As I looked at it more I got a feeling of storm anticipation. A huge storm cloud was coming on, while viewer cannot see the cloud, he can see a shadow of it moving in. You almost sense heavy humidity that condenses right before the storm.

If a photograph communicates feelings in my mind it is a good photograph. I tried to make it pop by increasing contrast, vibrancy, saturation and it was ruining that feeling. The image was too static and too obvious.

Quality vs. Quantity

Why are we chasing after making more and more photographs?

A famous Russian artist – Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov – spent 20 years on one painting which turned to be his whole artistic life. The painting is absolutely breathtaking.

We, photographers, on the other hand seem to want to produce more photographs per minute than ever. I’m not sure if industry is encouraging us or industry just meets our demand by producing faster shot per second cameras, faster cards, software to go thru photo-editing faster.

Do we produce something great or just visual noise? Is it time to slow down and think about what we trying to get to by doing this? I used to be inspired by single photographs of the past and I still am. Nowadays I’m subscribed to all kinds of digital photography feeds but for the most part all I get is one stream of noise. It seems that photography has become more about inventing something new rather than about creating something beautiful. Now single photograph is not enough, today it is all about folios. Is a folio just a way to unload more photographs into the market?

I wonder what would be an equivalent of spending twenty years on a single painting in photography? How would one work on one photograph their whole life? And what that photograph would be? Maybe a folio is an equivalent of that painting? And it is all about polishing that set of photographs: substituting some of them with other, reshooting some of them, redoing post-processing, etc. That seems to make sense, just don’t make me look at a folio of a thousand photographs.

Art?

Is a photograph of an art an art? Is a photograph of a sculpture an art? Is a photograph of a painting an art?

What is important in a photograph – an image or how it was made? Similarly for paintings: if we have two visually undistinguishable copies would we value the one that is proven to be original thru chemical analysis higher? Does it mean it is more important how something was made than its purpose?

I don’t have answers to either of the questions. It is just something I find interesting to think about.

Most important advice

Look at the world around you with your eyes wide-open. Like a child. There are endless possibilities for photography around. While photographing a sunset look at what’s behind it might be even more beautiful.

This is a series of posts with translation of my interview published in Russian at http://landscapists.info/vitaly-prokopenko. The question from the interview: “Give one Very Important Advice to our readers?” This is the last question from the interview.

Photography – hobby or work?

This is a series of posts with translation of my interview published in Russian at http://landscapists.info/vitaly-prokopenko. The question from the interview: “Is photography your hobby or job? Or maybe both at the same time?”

Photography is a hobby for me. I thought of making it my job but talking with photographers that made it their job I abandoned that idea. There is a lot of work goes into having photography as your job that is not directly related to making photographs like marketing, finances, workshops, etc. I’m not interested at all in that. I might as well to have a job completely unrelated to photography and do photography I like in the remaining time. After all I probably spend as much time doing photography I like as some professional photographers.

As far as money concerned I think the only way to make money in photography is to photograph weddings, portraits or advertisement.

By the way Brooks Jensen wrote it in a funny way in his book Letting Go of the Camera. Though he has built a successful business based on his love of photography.