Cognitive Dissonance= Crummy Photos

[John Kasaian]

A Lawyer friend introduced me to this phrase. I added the 'crummy photos' part.

When looking for subjects in the landscape, I tend to think of how a photo will look when its printed and if it will "look" like I've been accustomed to how a landscape photo should look. Even if I do all the technical stuff 'right' I end up with a crummy photo (or worse, a 'well done' crummy photo!) My dissonance. I got what I was looking for (but I wasn't looking at what I was truly seeing, only that which I had been expecting to 'see' which at best is predictable (and crummy)

I find its far more rewarding to forget about the print and forget about all the other landscapes I've seen and enjoyed, and deal with whats going on in 'real time,' selecting my subject based on what I'm seeing, not my own desire to "capture" an image that for all purposes might look like it would be a good magazine cover, poster, or post card but in truth will sit in my filling cabinet until the day comes when my heirs will chuck it into a dumpster.

I'm curious as to what others here think. Is Cognitive Dissonance a real problem when it comes to art and developing your own style, or am I being foolish for considering it to be a problem?

[Antonio Corcuera]

"Is Cognitive Dissonance a real problem when it comes to art and developing your own style, or am I being foolish for considering it to be a problem?"

I'd say Crummy Photos is a real problem when it comes to art!
On a more serious tone, I'm also concerned about the pre-image we have in our head before shooting the actual picture. Our preconceptions are based on what we've seen before and consider "correct" (not only by us but socially accepted -ie famous photographers, books, magazines).
This happens to me 99% of the time I'm out shooting. Before, I used to follow these preconceptions (in other words, I was copying one or more styles), but now I try to identify it and then think: how can I change this? I try to give it a twist, whether it be by changing the point of view, the lens, the framing...
In the end I end up with crummy photos anyway, but least I believe I'm trying to develop my own style.

[Struan Gray]

This is what a lot of so-called 'prosaic' photography is about, as well as much artworld landscape photography. The point is to photograph what's there, not what some nineteenth century academician would have preferred to be there. Contrails, power lines, cheaply-built strip malls and billboards for mobile phones are our visual heritage, whether we like it or not. Pretending they are not there by cropping, or by going to the few places they have yet to encroach upon, is a form of self-deceit.

This is not to say that your photographs have to be ugly. Just that they have a different sort of beauty. Look at the syncopated visual rhythms of Friendlander, or Frederick Sommers, or Ray Metzker and it is clear that you don't just have to fall back on 'documentary' value to create worth.

You have nothing to lose but your Velvia.

[John Cook]

Perhaps it is a matter of emphasis.

I freely confess that I am congenitally unable to make a b&w photograph which is devoid of technical spit and polish. I admire a shapely H&D Curve (at this stage of life) much more than that of Betty Grable’s legs. Although she definitely was a close second.

But my main focus in selecting a photo subject is on the telling of a story. Online photo submission sites are stuffed with properly composed, exposed and focused images for which no reason exists for their creation. Except possibly that it was a new camera, beckoning the (flat-footed, unimaginative) owner to put it to some sort of use to justify the cost. Many look to me as though the camera was accidently dropped and the shutter spontaneously fired. Nicely done, but why?

If the photographic subject isn’t capable of sparking at least a half-hour earnest conversation among my friends and I, I am reluctant to make the effort.

Even a photo-documentary on the secret inner workings of the local two-hundred year old municipal water treatment facility would be a dandy project for me. Much more so than an artistic rendition of a dramatic cloud or rock. (Yawn...)

I recall photographing the window of Laycock Abbey in England out through which William Henry Fox Talbot made his first photographic negative. I swear I could feel his presence, breathing down the back of my neck. And fortunately, I managed not to mess it up. What a great story about which to tell guests, over a large Jack Daniels.

[Michael Ting]

from wikipedia:


In brief, the theory of cognitive dissonance holds that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the human mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to minimize the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions.

now how is that going to affect your art?

[Ralph Barker]

Cognitive Dissonance? Isn't that when one's cogs are so worn that those around him or her can hear the noise?

Like you, John, I like to tell a good story with many of the images I shoot. In contrast, however, a good landscape (or even a good legscape, should one happen upon a Betty Grable look-alike while in the field) is supposed to elevate or inspire one beyond the mundane, creating what might be called a cognitive diversion. The dissonance creeps in when we realize that not everyone's cognition is diverted by the same sort of scene, or the photographic interpretation thereof. ;-)

[Aaron van de Sande]

I usually look for 'nice light' and then try to find a composition in the ground glass. I would have a hard time explaining what 'nice light' is.

[Brian Ellis]

Are you photographing in color or black and white? If color, I'm not sure how you get the print out of your mind when looking at the scene on your ground glass since that's a pretty close approximation of what the print is going to look like. Surely you wouldn't look on the ground glass, see that the scene looks terrible there, but make the photograph anyhow? If b&w, things get even more difficult I think. There you have to try to gain some idea of what the scene will look like in shades of gray. So to me the answer to your question is no. What you're calling "cognitive dissonance" (which I think is really more just a difficulty in getting beyond the trite and mundane rather than "cognitive dissonance" in the usual meaning of that term) isn't a problem. I think you have to give some thought to the photograph - we're photographers, we're not out there watching birds.

I do think it's useful to not be incessantly "searching" for a photograph and instead kind of let the photograph come to you (Ruth Bernhard talks about this a lot, more eloquently than I can). But once it has then I think a photographer has to evaluate it as a photograph and if it doesn't look like a potentially good photograph then pass on it and just enjoy the scene. John Sexton has a saying "better to have a good memory than a bad photograph" which I think is appropriate here.

[Donald Brewster]

Well, to draw from a writing analogy (which was told to me by a lawyer) -- "unclear thinking results in an unclear writing." If you don't know what you are trying to convey, or what you are conveying is merely prosaic, then the resulting photograph will be unclear or prosaic. As long as it looks like what you want it to look like, or conveys what you want it to say, I'd say you've had some success.

[Steve J Murray]

Like you John, I try to photograph whatever is "stimulating" to my brain. I certainly previsualize this image as a print on the wall, but I also realize oftentimes this image will not be like any "traditional" landscape. But, sometimes it is anyway because I am human and get excited by pretty sunsets just like anybody else. But, I still try to "see" beyond that as much as I can to get something more "interesting" that will give the viewer something to ponder a bit longer than a pretty sunset. Howerever, a lot of folks are just looking for that nice "sunset" to put over the couch, and if so, they will probably not like a lot of my photos.

[John_4185]

from wikipedia:

In brief, the theory of cognitive dissonance holds that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the human mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to minimize the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions.

One would think a wikipedia author would be more concise. What is implied by omission is that if one does not aquire, invent or modify, then he does nothing.

Or briefly, "You see something impossible then either rationalize or ignore it."

Everything can be made simpler. Even this.

[Annie M.]

If cognitive dissonance encompasses resolving the abiguities of the play between what is truly seen and what is known (our learned cultural consensual reality and the projection into nature of abstract ideas and images).... I do indeed find this dissonance a daily challenge with my photography.

I know that I bring with me to every sheet of film that timid hazy little painted landscape of the
Renaissance that elbowed it’s way past the Madonna into the foreground and all it’s later
strange incarnations and permutations within the rational side of the human mind, neatly shackled in perspective.... and all the shards of the landscape from when it had a rough time of it falling into the minds of the romantics and their way of seeing....(always peeking into that golden glowing middle distance those visual pleasure seekers!)
I am sure you are more versed in history of the landscape in art than I... I know very little of the nuances of changing vanishing points and the subtleties of horizon lines modulating up and down and then disappearing entirely into Turner’s smoke and behind Pollock’s Lavender Mist... you gotta love the abstract expressionists... (I’d probably be one myself except I don’t smoke and drink enough)... and then there are all those photographs.... my poor simple rational mind mesmerized by an endless flipbook of silver landscapes... it is a miracle I can see anything in the GG at all through that mountain of visual clutter I carry.

Photography with it’s inherent reductionist nature makes the simple act of seeing even more
difficult for me. However, gradually I am coming to the conclusion that striving for any kind of
photographic essentialism is a fallacy and that too much reliance on the rational mind will indeed spoil most photographs (the fact that I am relying less on my ‘rational mind’ will probably come as no surprise to some... they have probably assumed I had been doing that all along!)...

Anyway I keep trying to peek through the fog of dissonance hoping to see what is truly on the other side of the lens because I truly believe there is something wonderful and mysterious there worth seeing.

Cheers Annie

[Scott Fleming]

... "will sit in my filling cabinet until the day comes when my heirs will chuck it into a dumpster."

There but for the grace of God go we all. The plain truth, to me, is that we are a jaded lot ... the modern human race. But for the painters and photographers and other artists that actually stop .... and look .... we are so busy running to and fro that nothing so banal as a two dimensional representation of a scene or a nude or whatever is any longer able to reach us.

I used to be like that. Still am when I'm rushed or in a bad mood. I've just gotten old enough and slow enough to stop and smell the roses. Some of those photos we have in our file cabinets are well worth fame and respect. They'll just not be seen because there is not enough interest in the world regarding art.

Perhaps it is like Christianity. If one just reads the words of Christ ... the red parts ... and would follow that philosophy ... one would be happy AND what the world calls a saint. But that ole black book just sits there on the shelf and folks think its all too deep for them and impossible to understand anyway. Foolishness. Materialism and all it's roller coaster rides is what makes the world go round and our psyches twirl.

[John Flavell]

This is making my brain hurt. I asked the camera and it hurts, too.

[jim Ryder]

I keep trying to make a print of the fog and it's always a purple haze in silver.

[Steve J Murray]

Cognitive Dissonance is actually a theory from social psychology thought up by Leon Festinger in the 1950's. Its actually a very interesting theory and it turns out to be pretty accurate in real situations. It basically states that when confronted with two opposing views, which creates dissonance, a person will change his or her feeling or perception about one of the sides to reduce the dissonance.

For instance, if a valued photographer friend of mine dislikes a photo that I really like, it creates a dissonance in my mind. One of two things will happen to reduce my dissonance: my opinion of the photograph will diminish, or my opinion of my friend's artistic judgement will go down.

The theory is really about opinion and social interactions, not so much the internal dissonance created by a conflict between two opposing thoughts in one person, although you could certainly label that "dissonance" just as easily. The term "cognitive dissonance" refers to Festinger's idea.

I relate to what you are talking about John all the time when out photographing things. Do we want to please others and do the expected thing which will appeal to the masses, or do we please ourselves, and suffer the indignity of not being understood. Some people make a lot of money doing the first choice, and that's been discussed a lot in this forum through various issues. Others try to please the movers and shakers of the "fine art" market to make a living or a name for themselves in a more refined arena. Then there's those of us who just take photos of the things that excite them visually, and hope that someone else on the planet will also feel the same excitement when viewing the photo. I try to keep my mind clear from all the clutter and get real zen about it. More like meditation and just "see" and "feel" what's out there. If a great image results its a gonna be a product of good genes brought to fruition through the learning of a craft. I produce a lot of images I don't even like, but often enough a real stunner appears, and its all worth it. Intermittant reinforcement is the strongest you know. ;>)

[Michael Ting]

IMHO, there are more basic questions that should be discussed, before we attempt to answer the question above.

Is art objective, or subjective?

What is beauty, does it have any standards?

Answer these and you'll be able to answer 99% of the art questions out there.

I believe beauty is absolute. Beauty is not relative, and it is not unchanging. But the problem is too many people make themselves standards of beauty, when the fact is, people only lasts 70years, so will "beauty" disappear after they die? Beauty should be timeless, that is, it goes beyond time and history. I believe the sun still rises and sets the same way it did 2000 years ago when the greek philosophers were alive. I believe we all still find the scene beautiful today, as they did 2000 years ago. I believe human will always agree that beautiful women throughout ages have two eyes, not one, not three, and are walking on two legs. I believe harmonics in music is a real and solid rule. I believe there are harmonics in color too, and the same harmonics apply to paintings, photographs, fashion design, graphic design, interior design, and others. These are just some examples, I'm sure you've discovered many others throughout your photography years.

Discover what beauty is, and you'll have no questions doing your "art".

[Struan Gray]

Clement Greenberg called this "Alexandrism". I like his definition:


"...an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced:..."

[Leigh Perry]

Can we be sure that we are not dedicating our energies to an endeavour in which all of the possible creative options were exhausted within a short time after the invention of the endeavour? Within a short period, photographers had exhausted most available subject matter: buildings, still life, landscapes, people in various states of undress, etc. Total originality thereafter is difficult.

What remains available is originality in (ever) reduced measure.

For instance, the wilderness landscapes have all been shot -- so many times that they have largely become trite. But then the interactions of man and nature have also all been shot, just not as many times as the former. It seems to me that we are destined to spend our photographic creative lives producing images that someone can uncharitably find an antecedent for, at least broadly, if they try hard enough.

Our options may therefore be reduced to exploring the margins, probing the gaps between the efforts of our predecessors, which, as you increase the viewing distance, probably looks more and more like Alexandrism. How depressing :-)

[Struan Gray]

If you look at photography as being more like journalism than poetry there is always fresh material. The point is that so few photographers take the trouble to use it. I'm not just talking about photojournalism, but about the herd mentality that produced all those pictures of red sandstone at sunrise.

Photography seems to attract those who are instinctively nostalgic and sentimental. Partly because photographing something makes you aware of how much it has changed next time you see it, but also because of a bull-headed reluctance to question cosy definitions of what makes a good photograph. Look at threads here about favourite subjects, and all the old buildings, rusting factories and third-world grannies that end up on film. How often in photographic circles do you find someone photographing wafer fabs, new housing estates or the modern urban young? Lots of those sorts of photographs in the world of art photography, but not in the Alexandrine world of the internet, mainstream magazines, camera clubs and - shudder - international salons.

That probably sounds snobbish. I'm not putting photography down. Really. It's just that I wish the established photography world was more open to new ideas and less concerned with erecting plinths and statues to people who should be copied.

[paulr]

What Struan said.

And to address Michael Ting's point, that ended with "Discover what beauty is, and you'll have no questions doing your "art"." ....

I have to say I fundamentally disagree with much of this. There are so many presuppositions here, including the idea that what we are trying to do is make something beautiful in a way that is universally recognizeable as such. Many great artistic revolutions of the past were considered ugly at first, but are accepted examples of beauty now. Impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism all come to mind. The world of music is full of such examples going back hundreds of years. Today's outrageous punks become tomorrow's untouchable classics.

I would suggest that the quest for Universal Beauty leads to the Alexandrism that Struan defined above: themes mechanically varied in a hundred different works, where nothing new is introduced. Or as John Cook said, clouds and rocks: yawn.

There's nothing fundamentally boring about clouds and rocks (or any subject matter), nor is there anything fundamentally boring about a poetic, rather than a journalistic approach to art. As William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack of what is found there."

But the poems need to be exploring a real, individual experience of the world, not an established idea of what's beautiful. If you explore something that fascinates you, something you're drawn to but that you don't fully comprehend (visually or otherwise), and if you manage to make it visible to yourself and others ... then you will have done something true. It will likely be beautiful, but not in a way everyone's seen before.

[Struan Gray]

I should add that my exclusion of poetic photography was because I do think that innovation is harder there, at least doing it in a way that is a) truly new and b) has an audience of more than one.

[John_4185]

The natural scenic photograph that adds nothing to knowledge but only furthers romantic notions is at its dead-end. There is no art of it, neither is there cognitive-dissonance. That's okay.

Any picture that serves only to evoke 'feeling' is sufficient to satisfy what many scenics strive for, and locations for the same have been overdone. Enough of that. Photojournalistic scenes, pictures of natural and common human-place are, imho, more viable in terms of intrinsic value to the body of history. And if you like, pictures can still serve emotional ends, but I sense that emotion is reaching into heady places that the 'natural scenic' will not satisfy. Classic visual touchstones are being poured in cement, and visual language is changing dramatically.

Thanks to the marketplace and technology, today anyone can make a picture as easily as he can speak so that now the vernacular can be liberated from the mystery of picture making. And more of the same is coming. There is a revolution in image capture in the wings. Picture making will be further liberated, and it's going to disappoint some who have singularly obsessed upon resolution, rendering of gradation, etc.. What will they look towards to further their penchant for exclusive craftsmanship? It will be a very interesting, intellectually challenging time. I hope I live long enough to see it happen. For a mental experiment that demonstrates this, imagine how an ancient Greek sculptor might perceive the current technology of 3D sculpture rendering in which the human hand and mind has nothing to do with rendering the human figure in perfect form; instead, just Plug In the ideal and make a sculpture in the ideal pose. (Ancient Greek esthetics were nailed down to a regime. There was no originality to speak of, but only the pursuit of the same perfection of craftsmanship. The Romans later discovered sculptural 'gravity', and the art moved on a bit, but I digress.)

Of course it is still difficult to make a very good picture, and it is a high form of craftsmanship. Regardless of the advance of the technology, there will be classic photography, but the 'art' of realism is as dead as ancient Greek sculpture. Do we care? Probably not. Persons still do classic sculpture for personal reasons. So be it. But 'Art' it ain't and as a rare craft it is endangered enough that I think it is safe to say that these are the end-days of the genre.

What is left is a challenge. Some photographers have begun again a new photographic dialog by rendering controversial subjects with perfect Romantic technique; consider the Pissing images, the images of posed cadavers . Such is an exploitation of Vividness and a statement regarding the making objects with 'beautiful' craftsmanship. It serves to provoke the visual dialog. That's part of Art, something about pointing to the discourse itself to move beyond cliched craftsmanship. Making great quantities of pretty pictures will not balance the consequences of their work. It will only emphasize the former. Something else is needed., and it will be something simple but very difficult to evince. It always is.

[paulr]

jj, I'm confused by some of what you're saying. You seeming to be suggesting a dichotomy between pictures of "natural scenic" and "photojournalistic" pictures. I think it's a false dichotomy, or at least an unhelpful one.

A picture of a natural setting can be ournalistic or not, poetic or not, it can fit within the tradition we think of as scenic or picturesque or not, it can have depth or not, it can point to something beyond itself or not, it can evoke profound feelings or trite ones, it can work on one level or on many or on none at all ...

There's nothing intrinsic to a particular subject matter that can be attached to any set of values.

If you're talking about pictures that look like copies of old masterpieces (or copies of copies) on one hand, and pictures that depict the world we live in today on the other hand ... that's an argument that makes sense to me. And one I'd agree with. But I don't see how the journalistic style or natural subject matter have anything to do with this.

[John_4185]

Anwering paulr:

A scenic that has been photographed often enough eventually becomes more of the same and the photograph's value diminishes in all regards - first it adds no new information to the general body of knowledge, so that leaves the scene to become an object upon which techinique is demonstrated, and technique has been overdemonstrated already. Technique in this case is not art, but it is craftsmanship, and weary by now.

There's nothing intrinsic to a particular subject matter that can be attached to any set of values.

The subject matter itself is specifically what gives value to the photojournalistic image: the photograph adds to the body of knowledge; for an example in the genre of scenics consider images of Mount St. Helens. Let us remember the photograph's singular virtue among the visual arts - it's relationship to time. An obvious example is Rephotograpic Projects - they have certain value because they add to the body of information and evince the photograph's place in time.

FWIW, when Timothy O'Sullivan did is photographic project, he was making a photojournalistic body of work. He was not particularly concerned with making statements regarding the art and craft of scenics. Later, others took the scenic to make technical statements, romantic works that were certainly marketable and worthwhile to photography for the sake of its own craft, but very few people used the same scenes to make self-referencing artistic statements. (I can evince exactly this point, but I will do it in pictures over time.)

I will add one thing in this respect concerning Ansel Adams' work: he photographed the same scene many times, with one or two of the series becoming most popular, but the real value of that work in terms of the art of photography is the Series Itself, complete, side-by-side. The statement he made in a series of El Captain (five images in particular, but there were more) was about weather and season; the series has value in terms of photojournalism. Out-takes which evince singular romantic and technical expertise are out-takes which made his market.

I would love to find again some of A. Adams' very early work that showed what he did before he discovered filtration, and the directions he followed right after that. It was a turning point in his efforts, important in terms of his esthetic direction, however the scenes he chose to photograph did not change dramatically.