picture windows # 58 ~ on seeing

View from window ~ Montreal, CA • click to embiggenPaul Bradforth wrote on civilized ku # 762 : "I don't really feel I need to be advised to shy away from 'pretty pictures' though; I don't see anything wrong with pretty pictures, and I think it rather disingenuous to argue that anyone who likes them needs 'educating'

my response: Paul, I sincerely hope that the "clarification" in civilized ku # 762 helps dissuade you from the belief that, if "pretty pictures" are what you or anyone within the sound of my keyboard clattering aspires to making or appreciating, that I think that what they need 'educated'.

However, there are those who aspire to making pictures which "move beyond the pretty picture". That is to say, pictures that illustrate and illuminate. Pictures that have both the referent and the connoted. Pictures that, in the words of Roland Barthes - in his book, Camera Lucida - contain both the studium and the punctum.

It is for those who are interested in that aspiration that most of my writing(s) about the medium and its possibilities is aimed. It is within that context that I advise again being seduced by the "dark-side" - the slavish desire to take the easy road of making pretty pictures.

And, let me be perfectly clear about pretty pictures - pretty pictures are distinctly different from pictures that depict beauty or pictures that are beautiful (suggested reading: Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams). Pretty pictures are concerned mainly with the surface of things whereas, IMO, pictures that depict beauty engage the thoughtful viewer with what has been called the inner life of things, the 'life' that is beneath the surface of things ....

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock ... The camera should be used for a recording of life,for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. ~ Edward Weston

FYI, if you are not familiar with Roland's writings, studium is defined by Barthes as the element that creates interest in a photographic image. Punctum is defined by Barthes as the element in a photograph that pricks or "wounds" the viewer - the misbehaving detail that challenges the photograph's dry facility and is something which reaches out and grabs you by the shirt tail.

Now, perhaps those ideas and notions are just too much "education" for the average picture maker. If so, that's fine by me. To each his/her own and all that.

On the other hand, understanding, appreciating, and educating oneself to those ideas and notions is, IMO, paramount to the understanding and making of good / interesting pictures - pictures that move beyond mere visual entertainment and that contain, at the very least, the possibility of connecting the viewer to a more complex, nuanced, and illuminated meaning(s) than is found in the typical pretty picture.

And FYI, in addition to the aforementioned, my issue with pretty pictures is not so much with the pictures themselves - although, I do indeed find most but not all of them to be rather boring and repetitive. My issue is with the near total and somewhat slavish addiction to them that is, more often than not, exhibited by the viewing public and with those who feed them with a constant diet of the same.