civilized ku # 2752 ~ tell everything to your lawyer

Guinness neon ~ Toronto, CA • click to embiggen

A picture should draw you on to admire it, not show you everything at a glance. After a satisfactory general effect, beauty after beauty should unfold itself, and they should not all shout at once . . . This quality [mystery] has never been so much appreciated in photography as it deserved. The object seems to have been always to tell all you know.. This is a great mistake. Tell everything to your lawyer, your doctor, and your photographer (especially your defects when you have your portrait taken, that the sympathetic photographer may have a chance of dealing with them), but never to your critic. He much prefers to judge whether that is a boathouse in the shadow of the trees, or only a shepherd's hut. We all like to have a bit left for our imagination to play with. Photography would have been settled a fine art long ago if we had not, in more ways than one, gone so much into detail. We have always been too proud of the detail of our work and the ordinary detail of our processes. - Henry Peach Robinson

I agree with the above, but .... even if a picture gives the viewer great detail, that detail, in a good picture, can still leave the observer with a mystery - the mystery of why this?

That mystery alone can leave the viewer with a reason to engage with a picture beyond the 'mere' detail. In a good picture there is more than a bit left for our imagination to play with because a good picture maker always leaves a viewer with something beyond the visual to explore*.

Of course, it is always up to the viewer to be curious. Without curiosity, a picture is always just a picture - surface detail and no more.

*You might think of the desire to explore / curiosity in artspeak terms - developing and stretching your observational parameters for the perception of images.