Every so often I post something lengthy in some photography forum or another, and sometimes I want to get as much mileage out of it as a can… so I share it here. Recently there was a discussion about exposure blending and HDR and related stuff in one such forum and people were trying to decide whether HDR is a good, bad, useful, or indifferent thing. I posted a few times in that thread, but here is the final thing I added.
A poster read and quoted the following:
With our knowledge of post-processing techniques, are we involuntarily pre-disposed to see what could have been rather than what is? Does that limit our ability to appreciate the “what is”?
And then responded this way:
It definitely didn’t seem to limit Ansel’s appreciation of what is. You can see quotes throughout all of his books for many varying scenes on how beautiful it was. But then he will also say that he envisioned the final print as ‘stronger’ and did what was necessary to achieve his vision of the scene. Unless you aren’t talking about a live scene but rather a photo – a ‘plain’ photo that tried to capture ‘what is’. I don’t photograph to try and recreate what is. I would find that a waste of time and boring and leaving little in the way of artistic interpretation of the scene. I try to create a photograph using whatever tools necessary to achieve my vision of a given scene and hopefully with a somewhat unique outcome. But I will never limit myself to trying to replicate ‘reality’ as my eye saw it. I still appreciate what is, just not in my photos.
After that I offered up:
This brings up an interesting subject and one that seems to afflict landscape photography discussions more than it does discussions of other types of photography, namely this notion that a photograph “captures” what is “real” and that this can and should be its goal – and, by extension, anything that “manipulates” that “real” thing is somehow wrong and should be called out.
There is very little support anywhere for that idea, at least in the pure form that some seem to think it might have. Virtually every landscape photographer has said or will tell you today and shows through his or her own work that the idea of a photograph as an objective record of “what was there” is both impossible and undesirable. “Recording” the objective, physical nature of the subject – whatever the heck that even is – is almost completely missing the point.
First, it is impossible.
If we assume that the landscape that we see when in its actual presence at the time of the exposure is an objective and real thing, it is obvious that the camera cannot accurately capture that thing. There is a whole list of reasons for this to be the case, and it could include the following and more:
- The reality of the place is a continuum of light and seasons and atmosphere and more, yet the photograph only “captures” a tiny slice of the continuum that defines that subject.
- The camera cannot record all of the elements that define the nature of that subject – not the movement of air, the smell, the warmth of the sun, the exertion required (or not) to be there, and much more.
- The camera cannot “see” the scene the same way that our visual system does – which is the primary subject of this thread. I’ll just point out that bright clouds don’t blow out and shadows are not blocked and leaves don’t blur in the wind when we use our visual system to view them directly.
- The photographer’s most basic choices “edit” and transform the reality of the scene in important ways: where to place the camera, when to click the shutter, what to include/exclude from the scene, focal length, whether aperture choices make everything in focus or are selective, what the shutter speed does to moving elements of the scene, and much more.
- Other things that would make this list too long for this thread… ;-)
Second, even if it were possible it would be undesirable.
Let’s use Adams as an example. What moves many about his photographs is not the extent to which they are objectively “real” – fundamentally, they are not real. (The last time I checked, the world was not black and white.) What sets his work apart is the way that he used the tools at hand to interpret (not literally reproduce) the subjects of his photographs and the resulting personality and point of view that are expressed in his work. In other words, the literal subjects were, arguably, primarily a means for Adams to share his point of view and his passions through his photographs. In the end, the photographs tell us more about Adams than they tell us about his subjects. (I used Adams here because he is most likely to be known to all reading the thread, but virtually any other “landscape” photographer’s work would serve as well.)
To loop back to the thread, virtually all serious landscape (and other) photographers understand that it is an essentially unquestioned truth that photographs do not and cannot “accurately” portray the real subject, that they inherently (and aren’t we glad!) express a point of view, and that the notion of a pure “unmanipulated” “capture” is a strange and impossible concept. (Yet, for reasons that I won’t explore here, it seems to persist…)
This means that things are complicated. There is no “right” mode of expression, no “right” or wrong techniques, and no “right” type or amount of modification of a photograph in post. It is all relative and subjective. Some who like to imagine that a world of absolutes would simplify things find this difficult to understand and accept. Wouldn’t it be simpler if we could just declare that HDR or exposure blending or adding saturation or using curves or cloning out a spot were “wrong” because they were manipulations of the original “truth” of the scene and dismiss them as being objectively wrong or even dishonest, unethical, or immoral? But we can’t, if for no other reason than once you start down that absolutist road you would have to exclude most or arguably even all photography.
In the end it is about judgment and taste and the power of the photographer’s personal expression – and not simply an accounting of which techniques were used. Perhaps the least important thing about a photograph is how it was made.
…and, all of that said, I still feel it is an exciting time for photography. We are on a new frontier and at a crossroads regarding whether it will become a renaissance for the medium or the ultimate degradation. It’s up to us…
It is always fun and enriching to discuss art with you, Dan. I believe we would often be in the same part of the room, but we also bring differing perspectives that make the conversation interesting too. Believability is mainly what we are talking about, though it varies from viewer to viewer. It doesn’t bother me when people “work” their images either, as long as they are up front like Ansel. I do begin to get a little ruffled up when they imply that photographs that are not “worked” are less artful or “boring” for crying out loud. Many of my father’s dye transfer color prints have very vivid colors and are evolved significantly from the original color transparencies. In black and white, he often contact printed just like the Westons, but he did plenty of dodging and burning on larger prints too. If your photographs don’t stand up well before Photoshop, in my opinion, they won’t stand up after Photoshop either. Though the performance is never quite the same as the sheet music. I notice all the time that my camera doesn’t capture the scene at all the same as I see it. That’s when I make a note to myself to do such and such to post-process the image. I DO NOT see a scene and think, “Gee if I just took that tree out and amped up the color there and there, that would be amazing.” But that’s just me. Many other photographers today do think that way, and that’s OK, as long as they even the playing field by being honest about what they’ve done.
I have a favorite quote from E E Cummings.
“The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.”
I am not there yet, but I am trying.
Don, that is an interesting quote. I’m not certain that I can completely agree, though perhaps I misunderstand the meaning of the term “destructive” in this context. Trust me, it has happened before that I’ve failed to understand, though!
I do agree – strongly – that art is not about objective realism. I’m not even sure what that concept could mean in art, and I certainly don’t see how it could be meaningful in photography. Maybe the source of the confusion over the quote is that so many people think that the goal of art is simply to destroy or upend things. I used to have more sympathy with that idea, but now I feel that destruction alone does not make art, nor does simply questioning make art.
And perhaps I’m more of a “glass half full” guy – I don’t see art destroying something, even objective realism. I see it revealing something – most often through the unique perspective of the artist. (This is related to that thing I keep saying about “the photograph tells us more about the photographer than about the photographer’s subject.”)
Still, there is a lot to think about concerning that cummings quote. I need to ponder.
Dan
David, I’m very grateful for your contribution to this discussion – both for the real and important link to the wonderful photographic work of your father and for your wonderful and insightful perspectives on this particular issue and the photographers you mention.
I have seen certain training workshops – unrelated to photography – use an interesting exercise in which participants are asked to respond to certain questions and, after coming up with their individual positions, move to locations in the room corresponding to their answers. I have a feeling that you and I might frequently find ourselves standing in very close proximity.
When it comes to this idea of the “real” (and related notions such as “suspension of disbelief”) and so forth, I can rattle on for way too long – after all, I teach college as a profession – in the arts! One way that I accommodate the recognition that a photograph cannot actually be real but that certain kinds of photographs can fail by straying too far is to use, in my personal work, the simple concept of “believability.” When I look at a landscape photograph, I need to have confidence in what I can and cannot believe or trust about it. It doesn’t bother me at all that Adams photographs were in black and white even though that is not “real.” It also doesn’t bother me that he “worked the images” in optical/chemical post to achieve his vision. He was not deceptive or dishonest about that – to the contrary, he apparently shared what he knew and did quite openly. This is also why I can accept and enjoy work by photographers like Uelsmann, whose photographs are anything but “real,” but which are believable in the context of the transparency of what they do.
I suspect that you would join me in reacting uncomfortably (to put it mildly…) to those over-saturated, hyped-up, photographic inventions of something that wasn’t really there – as opposed to sort of photographic revelations of what actually is there that might not otherwise have been seen, if it were not for your father’s vision and the work of other photographers at his level.
One of the great things about the ready access to good and relatively affordable photographic equipment today is that far more people are interested in photography – both seeing it and making it. However, there are downsides. One is that so many people presume that the history of photography goes back to, oh, about a week before they bought their first P&S. Or that emulation of the flashiest and most gaudy stuff is a good thing.
I’m usually a hopeful sort though, and I think that what we really have is a golden opportunity to encourage more and more of these new photographers to discover not only the person with the newest G+ account… but also, and more important, the great work that has been done by those who came before us and the power with which those photographs and those photographers spoke and still speak.
I’ve been reminded by Charlie Cramer, virtually every time I hear him speak, of the importance of “interpretation” in photography, and that famous connection to Adams analogy to the score and the performance. Perhaps in some way the subject might be the score and what we do with that subject – including the work done in camera and afterwards – might today constitute the performance. A musician – and that’s what I am by formal training – knows that the score is to be respected and not strayed from by more than an appropriate small amount. Yet, the score is only the raw material for the performer, who must bring it to life to stamping it with his or her own personal stamp. In fact, it is literally impossible, on many levels, for the performer to “reproduce the score” in a performance. This is, I think, the point I was trying to make about the relationship between a photograph and the reality of the subject that it portrays.
Hope that makes some sense.
Dan
First of all, Dan, I must say that I appreciated reading your comments about my father on Google+. Also, I have great respect for your photography and outlook on photography in particular. At the same time, I have mixed feelings about the issues you mention in this post. With the advent of new tools, photography is busting out and transforming. I love the dramatically increased creativity that digital has brought us. At the same time, I am dismayed at the arrogance of some of the new generation of photographers who feel they are better than Ansel Adams, my father or any of the old masters who had a very different set of parameters to contend with. About 90 percent of the photographers today wouldn’t even be doing it if it weren’t so easy and accessible now. Ansel Adams is the most famous and did the most in the darkroom to alter his images, therefore, he is the master that everyone quotes. However, from an artistic standpoint, photographers like Edward Weston, Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White and many others had just as much to offer the medium. The big difference in photographers today and yesterday has to do with intent. The Pictorialists wanted their photography to be “Art” because they didn’t feel a photograph was artistic enough in its own right. This is the same kind of sentiment that I see echoed in the comments of the person you were conversing with above and with hoards of other photographers today. I mention intent because there is a difference between dressing up images and taking all the blemishes, warts, and freckles out, amping up the colors as high as possible just shy or often just past the point where they look awfully garish, and, working on images in such a way as to make them look as “realistic” as possible so as to represent nature “as it is.” Obviously, I agree that as you point out, this is impossible in an absolute sense, but I still contend that the intent to make photographs “realistic” can be there and produces very different results and a completely different look. I am not saying it is always necessarily a superior result or a better look, just that it is different and obvious when a photographer has this kind of intent. I am as big a fan of magic realism in literature as realism, but they are two different approaches to literature. Nobody would make the absurd argument that historical fiction is a waste of time because a book cannot possibly be “real.” A book is just words on a page, but a good novel can be very “real.” I realize I am going against the tide, bucking the current trends, fighting the crowd here in some ways, but I believe the masses of photographers online today would be amazed to walk into most of the leading photography galleries today and find that they also question the over-manipulation and incessant removal of objects in Photoshop. I would warn photographers today that there is a complete disconnect between popular sentiment on these issues and what collectors are buying. Why isn’t a raw file just as much art as one that has been post-processed? Why is a post-processed photograph somehow more like “art,” as if being “artistic” is even necessary? If someone feels their raw files are so boring, maybe they need to work on their creativity “in camera” rather than after camera. Photography does not have to be like art or strive to be more artistic, photography IS an art, period.
An interesting argument well presented and eloquent in it’s delivery. I ave struggled for years with the idea of being a purist, or more accurately being labeled a purist. I would shoot almost exclusively on medium format, using transparency film (the slower the better), hand held meter – incident readings and resisted the urge to adjust images heavily in the darkroom. Oh and I shot a lot of landscapes…
But the reality is that I was never a purist; the thought of spending time in a darkroom instead of outside shooting was a large part of how I worked and why. Another part was learning to work with restrictions.
I realised of course that film choice, time of day and other factors affected the result as much as any darkroom technique.
I now shoot digital. I use Photoshop. I use HDR when I choose. I still, however, approach a shot as if I were using transparency film, I still prefer to be out shooting instead of processing, but HDR allows me to capture a scene as I see it which my camera is still not always able to do.