man & nature # 122 ~ as I see it
Friday, April 10, 2009 at 08:16AM 
A little eddy above the old Roger's dam • click to embiggenOn yesterday's entry Andre Moreau asked:
.... as photographers are we bound to depict only reality while other art forms do not have that constraint?
Simply put, the answer is, "No." It's your party and you can cry if you want to ... (It's My Party ~ 1963, Lesley Gore).
But, the real deal is not so much that other arts do not have that "constraint", it's that other art forms do not have photography's inherent and inimitable characteristic as a cohort to/with the real - one of the medium's distinguishing characteristics that irrevocably separates it from other art forms by endowing it with its own unique identity. Whether a picture maker chooses to toil in the mine of that particular characteristic or not is a personal decision.
FYI, on a related note, there is a raging debate of sorts over on TOP which started HERE and continued HERE. 141 comments have been made on the topic and they cover the normal gamut of opinions on the subject.
Mike Johnston, the man on the throne at TOP, stated his feelings - which closely resemble mine - on the subject:
... My problem is merely that the pictures don't look like Earth ... Earth never looked like this ... What the Wretched-Excess Style does remind me of are those fanciful illustrations (some of them cartoons) showing what things supposedly looked like in the time of the dinosaurs. You know the pictures I'm talking about? Lurid hues to signify exoticism, bizarrely-colored plant life, pasturing Stegasaurii in bright Amazon-lizard stripes and fades, festive volcanos spewing oranges and reds in the distance, all under a pink or yellow or violet sky. All very saturated with color, and wonder .... I look at Earth a lot more than I look at pictures, and I happen to think pictures taken on Earth should sorta look like Earth.
Of course (and rather predictably), just like clockwork, the relativists in the crowd chimed in with (as an example):
... You just can't tell people how Earth looks. One person's "real" is another's "dull" and neither is correct.
Here I go again, but, it must be stated that the person who left that comment is an absolute fool. An ignoramus. A dolt. A know-nothing of the highest order. He has shit for brains.
To wit, I spent a large part of 30 years of my life in photography doing product pictures. If I, as an example, had told my client from R.T. French that there was no different between a hyper-saturated, an under-saturated, or a close-as-the-medium-allows realistic picture of their mustard container, I would have been ushered to the exit in short order. And, no checks would be in the mail after me.
Or, if I had told them that it was just fine that their mustard and the hot dog which it adorned were not as accurately depicted as possible relative to how they actually appear, the account would have taken a walk. And, no checks would be in the mail after them.
The logic here is simple - no "correct" = no check.
Needless to say, I, and many other commercial photogs, spent a great deal of time and effort getting color right. And, that effort now seems positively archaic relative to the tools at our disposal then versus those at our disposal today - aka, Photoshop. But even with that said, we were able to get it quite "correct" even back then, thank you very much.
Fortunately, we had a very useful guide to getting it correct - it was called reality. All you had to do was hold the real thing in one hand and a picture of it in the other and whether it was correct or not was very plain to see.
That does not mean that the color of the mustard / hot dog / container matched the real things exactly. What it means is that, within the constraints of the medium, some results were much more true to the real things than not.
Indeed, those results were called, "correct".
The same holds true for just about any genre of picture making you care to mention. As they relate to the medium's unique characteristic as a cohort to/with the real, how one treats color, contrast, saturation, etc. does matter. That's because, without a doubt, some results are much more "correct" than others.
An addendum: Pahleeeeze, stop with the all pictures are an interpretation of the the real as a rational for the notion that, therefore, no interpretations are "correct". Get a grip on reality - once again, as they relate to the medium's unique characteristic as a cohort to/with the real, some interpretations are, in fact, much more correct than others.
