civilized ku # 2880 ~ one's own worst (not best) critic

Easter Sunday light ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen

Due to some client project immediacy my last entry, now deleted and replaced by this one, went live by mistake long before it was complete. So, after reworking the picture, and adding the following text, here is what it was intended to be ....

About 2 moths ago Eric Fredine announced that he was "slowing the pace", re: posting pictures on his blog. That decision seemed to stem from the fact that he did not want to publish anything less than "first-rate" pictures of his making, a standard which, as ideals go, ain't a bad thing.

Of course, IMO, many of Eric's self-acclaimed second-raters could hardly be described as .... well .... second rate. But hey, self-imposed standards are there for a reason and hopefully they work for, not against, the self-imposer.

However, IMO, rating / critiquing one's own pictures is a risky business. I write that simply because there is a tendency to view our own pictures as would a photographer and, as far as I'm concerned, that is most definitely NOT a good thing. I am most decidedly in the same camp as Bruce Davidson when he stated :

I am not interested in showing my work to photographers any more, but to people outside the photo-clique.

Why is that so for me? Because my experience of showing my pictures - in books comprised of a specific body of work - to "average Dick and Janes" has been that those viewers tend to immediately get to the meat of the matter. That is, what the pictures are about / trying to communicate. They never let the things that photographers seem to care so much about - pick any or all technical and art sauce matters you care to choose - get in the way of experiencing the emotional / intellectual content of a picture when first viewing a picture.

The same holds true, re; average Dick and Hanes, at my various gallery exhibitions and I can always identify the photographer(s) in the crowd because they're the ones sticking their noses 3 inches from the surface of a print. Or, if not observed doing that, their conversation with me seems to always begin with, "What camera are you using?" or some other irrelevant observation / comment. To date, I have managed to avoided responding with, "It's not about the camera, moron, it's about the pictures."

When it comes to deciding which of the pictures in a given body of work is "first-rate" or "second-rate", I have pretty much given up on trying to pre-determine which picture, if any, will emerge from the body of work as a stand-alone / greatest-hit crowd favorite. That's because, in most cases, there are nearly as many favorites as there are viewers. And very often, if a favorite does emerge from the pack, it is not even close to the one I might think it should be.

Does this mean that I am crowd sourcing to determine which of my pictures is first-rate? No, not all. The crowd has their choice and, like them, I have mine.

All of that written, I must write that I really don't critique my pictures per se. Instead, I edit them. That is, in the process of making a book of a given body of work, I choose what I feel are the strongest (some slightly more so than others) pictures which illustrate and illuminate my intended / stated theme. Which, I guess, is a form of critiquing but that critique is more of group thing than an individual picture thing.

And guess what? Not every picture in a body of work can be first-rate. There will always be a few so called second-raters in the bunch. Although, the difference between the two is, hopefully, often razor thin and identifiable only by the maker of those pictures. And if he/she keeps that dirty little secret to themselves, very few, if any, will be the wiser.

I still, and always will, believe that a body of work is the strongest manner in which to express an idea, picture wise. In a manner of speaking, a single picture (first-rate, second-rate, it doesn't matter) is just a single word. A body of work is a complete sentence or even a paragraph. If one concentrates on the total picture (pun) / paragraph, the average Dick and Janes will choose their own favorite word or phrases ..... again from Bruce Davidson

Most of my pictures are compassionate, gentle and personal. They tend to let the viewer see for himself. They tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art.

Comments

[Fred]

"The same holds true, re; average Dick and Hanes, at my various gallery exhibitions and I can always identify the photographer(s) in the crowd because they're the ones sticking their noses 3 inches from the surface of a print. Or, if not observed doing that, their conversation with me seems to always begin with, "What camera are you using?" or some other irrelevant observation / comment. To date, I have managed to avoided responding with, "It's not about the camera, moron, it's about the pictures.""

Mark,

Why not take the photographers question in the best spirit possible? They are interested enough in your work to want to know more about it or perhaps to even imitate it, the sincerest form of flattery. So, maybe they aren't an art critic or art consumer that you wish they were but they found something interesting enough about your work to not just turn around and leave shortly after entering your show. I imagine a photographer seeing your work for the first time might wonder "why square"? I did. Is he using a hasselblad or a TLR and not wanting to lose a single bit of image space to cropping? Oh, he's not? Why does he crop everything square?

There are seriously good and highly acclaimed photographers that use highly specialized and sometimes very expensive equipment to make their art, I'm guessing they go through the trouble and expense for valid reasons. And then there are photographers that get by with very inexpensive equipment and revel in that aspect as a distraction avoided, also a very valid reason.

Maybe when a photographer asks you what equipment you used, just tell them, and if your equipment is easily affordable and accessible to every man, your message of "it's not about the camera" will be self evident. I visit your blog because I like many of your pictures but somewhere long ago I learned that you use m43 and crop everything square and like to vignette and now I know the tools you use to share YOUR vision. And I never really thought about it much after I satisfied my initial curiosity.

Now that you are no longer interested in showing your work to photographers, does that mean you are also no longer interested in viewing the work of other photographers?