tourist picture / squares² # 10 / diptych # 152 ~ a tough pill to swallow for some photographers

Kingston Brewing Company truck ~ Kingston, Ontario / Canada • click to embiggen
The Breakers / Vanderbilt mansion ~ Newport, RI. • click to embiggen
dirty window with shadow ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen

I was recently richly rewarded when reading an article, Canon 5Ds Review Through Print Performance, on The Luminous Landscape. The title of the article was the reason I read it. Imagine, testing a camera through print performance - what a concept (duh) - as opposed to the lab testing of various technical properties of a sensor.

What I meant when I wrote that I was richly rewarded is that - nevertheless, despite the title - I was expecting to read a lot of techno gobbled gook and in that respect I was indeed richly rewarded inasmuch as my expectations were fully met, if not totally exceeded. Although, in truth, I didn't actually read the gobbledy gook so much as skip over it.

All of that written, I was rather amused when I scrolled down to what might be labeled the "conclusion" part of the article. SPOILER ALERT - After writing /explaining about all of his various print making and testing gobbledy gook minutiae, the author concludes that the Canon 5D came out on top the the test (comparison against earlier Canon cameras) in terms of ultimate resolution. He deduced that, for his professional use (read the article), the better resolution made upgrading sensible and justifiable.

However, here's the part I found amusing:

Not one of the half dozen non photographers I showed the prints to mentioned detail in the images. When asked for differences, most popular was spotting the slightly different view, next up was that the brickwork was ‘a bit redder’ in one print. Most common observation – that the council should do something more about the landlords who dump stuff from student housing when clearing houses at the end of the academic year. Even when I pointed to detail in the biggest prints, several people 'couldn’t see the difference’. One even said they liked the 1Ds print the best (I’m told the look on my face was worth seeing…)

Yes, it really is about the content of the picture to most people. This backs up my own (and gallery owners I’ve spoken to) experience that people who buy prints don’t carry a magnifying glass with them – they look at what the picture is about and what it means to them. It’s a bit of a tough pill to swallow for some photographers...

So, hmmmm, here's the deal. Is there any picture maker out there who still doesn't understand that, for the picture viewing / buying public, it's a picture's referent coupled with, at least at some level, meaning which connects the viewer / purchaser with a picture?

The answer, of course, is yes. For them, the pursuit of technical "perfection" is what it's all about. Unlike Jeff Wall, for whom the subject matter is "just the door that opens the way to the picture", the pixel-peeping resolution fetishists believe that technical matter(s) is/are the door that opens the door to making the picture. And, unfortunately, many of them, in pursuit and application of things technical at the moment of making a picture, lose sight of the art of seeing, which is the truest manner of making pictures which approach real "perfection".

Comments

[Markus]

Thanks, Mark, for reading that Luminous Landscape down to the bottom. I didn't, and therefore missed the crucial part (and a good laugh).

That pixel peeping had its importance probably 10 years ago, when the digital cameras were in their infancy, but meanwhile they are as "good enough" as they can be. Even that regression to view cameras, that picture makers like Stephen Shore saw necessary for quality reasons decades ago now is (for many purposes) not necessary any more.