man & nature # 122 ~ as I see it
Friday, April 10, 2009 at 08:16AM 
A little eddy above the old Roger's dam • click to embiggenOn yesterday's entry Andre Moreau asked:
.... as photographers are we bound to depict only reality while other art forms do not have that constraint?
Simply put, the answer is, "No." It's your party and you can cry if you want to ... (It's My Party ~ 1963, Lesley Gore).
But, the real deal is not so much that other arts do not have that "constraint", it's that other art forms do not have photography's inherent and inimitable characteristic as a cohort to/with the real - one of the medium's distinguishing characteristics that irrevocably separates it from other art forms by endowing it with its own unique identity. Whether a picture maker chooses to toil in the mine of that particular characteristic or not is a personal decision.
FYI, on a related note, there is a raging debate of sorts over on TOP which started HERE and continued HERE. 141 comments have been made on the topic and they cover the normal gamut of opinions on the subject.
Mike Johnston, the man on the throne at TOP, stated his feelings - which closely resemble mine - on the subject:
... My problem is merely that the pictures don't look like Earth ... Earth never looked like this ... What the Wretched-Excess Style does remind me of are those fanciful illustrations (some of them cartoons) showing what things supposedly looked like in the time of the dinosaurs. You know the pictures I'm talking about? Lurid hues to signify exoticism, bizarrely-colored plant life, pasturing Stegasaurii in bright Amazon-lizard stripes and fades, festive volcanos spewing oranges and reds in the distance, all under a pink or yellow or violet sky. All very saturated with color, and wonder .... I look at Earth a lot more than I look at pictures, and I happen to think pictures taken on Earth should sorta look like Earth.
Of course (and rather predictably), just like clockwork, the relativists in the crowd chimed in with (as an example):
... You just can't tell people how Earth looks. One person's "real" is another's "dull" and neither is correct.
Here I go again, but, it must be stated that the person who left that comment is an absolute fool. An ignoramus. A dolt. A know-nothing of the highest order. He has shit for brains.
To wit, I spent a large part of 30 years of my life in photography doing product pictures. If I, as an example, had told my client from R.T. French that there was no different between a hyper-saturated, an under-saturated, or a close-as-the-medium-allows realistic picture of their mustard container, I would have been ushered to the exit in short order. And, no checks would be in the mail after me.
Or, if I had told them that it was just fine that their mustard and the hot dog which it adorned were not as accurately depicted as possible relative to how they actually appear, the account would have taken a walk. And, no checks would be in the mail after them.
The logic here is simple - no "correct" = no check.
Needless to say, I, and many other commercial photogs, spent a great deal of time and effort getting color right. And, that effort now seems positively archaic relative to the tools at our disposal then versus those at our disposal today - aka, Photoshop. But even with that said, we were able to get it quite "correct" even back then, thank you very much.
Fortunately, we had a very useful guide to getting it correct - it was called reality. All you had to do was hold the real thing in one hand and a picture of it in the other and whether it was correct or not was very plain to see.
That does not mean that the color of the mustard / hot dog / container matched the real things exactly. What it means is that, within the constraints of the medium, some results were much more true to the real things than not.
Indeed, those results were called, "correct".
The same holds true for just about any genre of picture making you care to mention. As they relate to the medium's unique characteristic as a cohort to/with the real, how one treats color, contrast, saturation, etc. does matter. That's because, without a doubt, some results are much more "correct" than others.
An addendum: Pahleeeeze, stop with the all pictures are an interpretation of the the real as a rational for the notion that, therefore, no interpretations are "correct". Get a grip on reality - once again, as they relate to the medium's unique characteristic as a cohort to/with the real, some interpretations are, in fact, much more correct than others.
Reader Comments (4)
Interesting post Mark. I would add to Andre Moreau's comment that it isn't that photography is constrained where other art isn't, but rather that photography provides the opportunity to have a relationship with the world that other media don't. You can throw that away if you wish, but in doing so you are discarding one of the strongest, most interesting things about photography (to borrow from Roland Barthes): that you can say of what you see in the photo: 'this has been.'
There is no doubt that a photographer can take a spectrophotometer's view of color and many photographers are expected to aspire to measurable accuracy of their subjects. It's fair to call this reality, but it ignores the fact that we don't perceive colors the way a spectrophotometer does. The perception of color and the measurement of color are very different things. The yellow of of your mustard will look different in various contexts, under different light, and when combined with other colors even though the 'correct' color hasn't changed. We also remember the perception of color differently than we perceive it, which adds another layer of possibilities to what we might choose to capture in photography. It's a subtle difference, but I think you will have to agree that an honest attempt to capture the perception of reality rather than the a machine-measured reality is a valid approach and one that leaves substantially more room for interpretation.
So as much as I hate to admit it, I agree with the shit for brains ignoramus. You might be able to tell me how the world is in many measurable ways, but how the world looks, how I perceive it, is an incorrigible private experience.
I've read Roland Barthes 'La chambre claire" in 2007. Wasn't much impressed and when I finished the book, I remember saying "Quel con!"
I had read the TOP piece that you referred to before posting here. My take on this is that the Danish may have created more problems than they sought to resolve. We'll see.
And about that "doctored" photograph from the danish photographer that many on the TOP forum alluded to: I really can't see anything that could not have been done in the darkroom, had the image been shot on film.
My take on this is that people all over the world are downright scared of Photoshop. You see this in forums and other exchanges: "No post processing", and he use of words such as "slightly" and "lightly" when referring to Photoshop.
I see a trend developping. Stay tuned...
I think reality is somewhere in between the two positions but rather much closer to yours than to the 'shit for brains ignoramus'.
There clearly is a range of perception of reality. Some people do see things (or more importantly remember the sight of things) more vividly than others. That's one reason why Disneychrome ended up so popular with landscape photographers, the punchy rendering of Velvia matches the memory if not the reality. And memory is reality for many people. It's the difference between objective reality where colour can be specified accurately as a given value in a given gamut and subjective reality where colour is subject to the interpretation of the individual. Both exist, and while Objective reality matters in the commercial and scientific world it's the subjective reality that matters in the Art world.
But as with anything, taking it too far becomes popular and trendy at some point. Look at the entire HDR fad. Absolutely ridiculous renderings became the norm using a technique that can do some brilliant and realistic renderings if applied appropriately. The over-saturated, high contrast look has become the new fad in imaging which I'm thankful for as it looks a lot less ugly than the last two fads in the Flickr-world(over-enhanced local contrast B&W and overblown HDR)
I'll admit to doing the overblown rendering of colour myself on occasion with some of my cityscapes. It's fun and the results can work if you aren't necessarily attempting to show the truth of the subject. My Cityscapes are unabashedly intended to show the best of the city rather than the truth of it. They very much aren't my personal opinion of the city but rather an exploration of the side of the city others see and I don't as I try and understand an idealized take on the city which I don't share.
I'm not sure commercial photography is a good example of photography as reality. I have seen boxes of corn flakes dumped onto a light table in order to pick out enough perfect flakes to make one perfect bowl to be photographed. The flakes may be real, and the photograph may represent some reality, but it does not represent what I will get if I open open a box of flakes and dump out a bowl full.