civilized ku # 2362 ~ night light

Street light, fog, and trees ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack Park • click to embiggenI've spent a fair amount of time over the past 2 days, on Tuesday in particular, going out around the nearby environs and neighborhood in search of the non-cliché Autumn Color picture. The net result, picture wise, is a collection of 24 pictures which I will post later today.

That written, making non-cliché pictures isn't all that much of a challenge for me. In large part, that's because long before - in fact, decades before - I ever read Brook Jensen's Things I've Learned About Photography (a list of 131 tidbits Jensen has learned from his experience), my M.O. for making picturing was, and has been ever since, in the manner advocated by Jensen in 1 of his tidbits:

Real photography begins when we let go of what we have been told is a good photograph and start photographing what we see.

Jensen prefaced that notion with the idea that ... "Most people see good pictures and photograph bad ones" ... a true statement if ever there were one.

IMO, most people make "bad" pictures - well, not actually "bad", but rather, rote copies of pictures they (and everyone else) have seen before - for 2 primary reasons: 1) most people are followers, not leaders, and, 2) most of their "inspiration" comes from pictures they have seen in mass media sources and, like Pavlov's dogs, they have been conditioned to salivate at the sight of sugar-coated dreck.

Given that few would contest reason # 1, let's concentrate on reason # 2 .... Mass media sources have one primary function above all others, and that is, according to an age old industry adage, to "sell soap". Or, to be more precise, to sell advertising so advertisers can sell their soap. And, it's a numbers game - the more people you can attract to your particular brand of media, the more the soap sellers are inclined to hop on board your train (with pockets full of $$$$$$) and go for a ride.

So, you might wonder, what does that have to do with picture making?

The answer is really quite simple - having spent my picture making career making pictures for those who sell soap - Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb / RayBan, Corning, Heinz, Quaker State, RT French, to name just a few - I can tell you with high degree of authority that the pictures made for clients such as those mentioned, as artful as they might seem on the surface of things, are nothing, more or less, than sugar-coated representations of their particular brand of soap. Everything about those pictures must, indeed, be "picture perfect".

And where do those clients place their picture-perfect pictures? In the most popular media (which is itself picture perfect) they can afford. How does that media become popular with the masses? I'm here to tell you that it's by catering / pandering, picture wise, to the lowest common denominator, aka: pretty pictures (National Geographic magazine, included) . Pictures in which everything is perfectly pretty - the light, the color, the saturation, the composition, et al, all of which are most often amped up to 11* on a scale of 1-10.

With the number of advertising impressions an average American is exposed to on a daily basis, estimated to be from a low of 300 to a high of 3,000, what all this pretty picture saturation (picture perfect media + picture perfect advertising) amounts to is a very effective campaign / indoctrination of telling people what a good picture is, which in a nutshell is very simple ...

.... if a picture doesn't slap you upside the head, kick you in the ass, sear your eyeballs, or immediately leave you breathless - with either its spectacular subject matter or its spectacular amped up execution (preferably both) - then it's just not a "good" picture. As the media machine keeps telling us, quiet, subtle, thoughtful stuff, picture wise and otherwise, is for pinheads, suckers, and wimps.

So, if imitating what you have been told by the mass media is a good picture - your rote model, so to write - have at it. As I have often stated, picture making wise, do whatever floats your boat. Don't let my picture making opinions get in your way, under your skin, or, take it personally. Just do it.

As for me, I have been lucky enough to see, and pay attention to the man behind the curtain, Picture Making Division. One might even say that, at times, I was the man behind the curtain, picture making wise. However, (WARNING: Elitist Alert) I was so much younger then, I'm wiser than that now.

*The concept of "amped up to 11" comes from the movie, This Is Spinal Tap, a send up of rockumentary films from the 70s and 80s. In an interview segment in that film, the band leader characters, David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel are revealed as competent composers and musicians, but they are also dimwitted and immature. Tufnel, in showing his guitar collection to DiBergi (the fictitious film maker), reveals an amplifier that has volume knobs that go to eleven; when DiBergi asks, "Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?" Tufnel can only reply, "These go to eleven."

Comments

[Craig Tanner]

Hey Mark

Let me preface my questions with a comment which I have made many times here. I am regularly inspired by your work. In general I am a big fan of photography that is documentary in nature. Sternfeld's "American Prospects" is still one of my all time favorite photographic bodies of work. In my own work I have almost zero interest in shooting in a documentary style. I am in large part (understatement) an interpretive photographer (and probably always will be).

The questions relative to this post and the last one……If you really mean "whatever floats your boat" then why keep beating the "dead horse"? As an artist and human being what do you get out of or hope to get out of creating and publishing these types of essays?……And do you feel like they are an important companion to your photography?

Thank you for all you do here… its greatly appreciated….Craig