The truth of B&W pictures

[Hugo Zhang]

A few years ago, inspired by AA's picture of Aspon trees, I took a picture of a group of young trees in Yosemite velley. A dozen of them, slender trunks and thin arms with almost translucent white skins, stood and bathed in the warm afternoon light of the early fall, solitary in their own world. Behind them were dark old trees and massive mountains slopes. That picture became one of my favorite and I mounted it and framed it. One of my friends liked the picture so much and I told her that she had to go to Yosemite to see those trees. I told her the exact location of these trees. I told her the time I took the picture. So she went to Yosemite the following year and came back greatly disappointed. Yosemite was a great place for sure and she went to see those trees, but they were not as pretty as they were in my picture. I tried to make sure that she saw the right trees. Yes, she did. But it is a picture, not a painting, I told her, pictures don't lie. I didn't realize then that my B&W picture of the trees was not the trees she really saw and the picture had to go through a transformation in her mind. Thus the question: how true is B&W pictures if they change their shapes and forms in each view's mind based on his/her experiences and expectations?

[Kirk Gittings]

I told her, pictures don't lie.

Actually pictures do lie and B&W in particular. B&W is fundamentally an abstraction even without the considerable ability we have to control tone and contrast etc. That is what for me makes it an art form, why I am an artist and not a journalist.

[JW Dewdney]

To think of photography on that level - to hold it accountable for a purely optical phenomenon - is to deny all it's power. To me - photography isn't about that. It's about the imagination - it's about evoking the a dream world.

[Bruce Watson]

There are a number of reasons why photographs are not good representations of reality. First, you isolate a part of reality from its context. Then, you transform the 3D reality into a 2D representation. Then, for B&W, you transform the color information by the spectral characteristics of the film (mostly non-linear). Then you manipulate the tonal relationships that are left into the tonal relationships in the final print.

The final print is absolutely an abstract. It might be based in reality, but it's not reality.

That your friend was disappointed by the reality, and in fact preferred your abstracts is a nice complement. You should be pleased.

[Mark Sampson]

"Art is a lie that tells the truth."
-Pablo Picasso

[Capocheny]

There are a number of reasons why photographs are not good representations of reality. First, you isolate a part of reality from its context. Then, you transform the 3D reality into a 2D representation. Then, for B&W, you transform the color information by the spectral characteristics of the film (mostly non-linear). Then you manipulate the tonal relationships that are left into the tonal relationships in the final print.

The final print is absolutely an abstract. It might be based in reality, but it's not reality.

That your friend was disappointed by the reality, and in fact preferred your abstracts is a nice complement. You should be pleased.

I concur with all that Bruce has said above... and, Hugo... you should be pleased! :)

This sort of reminds me of the Brita ad on television where the guy tells his girlfriend's father that she's a total score because she gives him things and blah, blah, blah. As this gets passed up the line through a few guys, at the end, when the words get translated to the father... it comes out that the gal is an example of grace and charm!

Filtration as it were! We all see and perceive things differently and this is what makes us unique in terms of our appreciation of fine art.

As Bruce said... it may be based in reality... but it's not reality!

Cheers

[John Kasaian]

I think it depends a great deal on how photography is employed. It can be offered as evidence in court, so how can it be a lie? OTOH photography is subject to a whole slew of induced variables between the actual and the print, so how can it be taken as factual?

A lot has to do with interpretation. Take an x-ray---a trained eye can spot things---real and actual things most of us can't.

I will assume that you took your photo of the trees intending it to be an accurate facsimile of what you saw. An illustration of something in nature. Since the photo pleases you, I'll also assume that you did a good job of it---it is really and truly an illustration of what you saw, only in B&W (another assumption being that you're not color blind)Consider that color might not be a true representation either. If I remember my physics correctly color is how a surface reflects light---not a 'part' of a subject although the surface that creates to color may well be. Take an orange down a mine shaft and turn out the lights and your orange isn't the color orange anymore. In the absence of light there isn no color if you don't count black as a color.

OK I could be wrong about this. I'm not the scientist.

The trees didn't look the same to your friend for a number of reasons.
1) In real life, they were in color and it is difficult for many to see color translated into tones of B&W.

2) Trees grow or are damaged and the sun changes angles as well. All these variables contribute to how the trees are percieved.

3) Size is illusionary in photography. Unless you have a known in the shot where the human eye can judge the scale of something, a viewer cannot be sure of its size. For example certain geological features might be percieved as towering while in fact they might only be a few feet high.

All this is assuming you didn't 'tweak' things with extreme pc, filtration, or exposure.

I like to look at documentary photography as being a realistic illustration of something physical. Even abstractions can be realistic illustrations of physical things which the eye cannot immediately recognize---often because the subject is illustrated in detail rather than overall form. I'm reminded of Merg Ross' abstract of the cracked and checked vinyl upholstery on a worn stool. It was very realistic, but the eye cannot recognize it for what it is. The imagination soares. But now I can't look at a worn stool without thinking of Merg's photo and saying to myself "It looked just like that one!"

Thanks for an interesting thread!

[paulr]

You're also describing why vision doesn't represent reality. We don't see things; we see the light reflected from things, and out in the world the light is always changing. This point is the stock and trade of photographers of natural ephemera like Adams.

It's a phenomenon that keeps the world interesting for us, allowing us to rediscover a particular place a hundred times.

It sometimes also drives me crazy. When I lived in Providence, I walked a couple of miles to work early in the morning, through all kinds of neighborhoods. I'd often see things that intrigued me and that I wanted to photograph. But on Saturday, when I'd roll out of bed at noon and walk to the same spot with my camera, I'd see nothing.

Yeah, yeah, the earlybird gets the bla bla bla. To hell with the earlybird.

[Brian Sims]

Photographs don't lie any more than our own preception (eyes/brain). Put a group of 6 people on a ledge looking out over Yosemite valley. Several months later, ask them each to recall what they saw and how it made them feel. You will get 6 very different responses. A photograph simply injects the photographer's interpretation into the preception process and freezes it. It is no more a lie than the preceptions of 6 people interpreting the same view.

[Gordon Moat]

The earlybird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat

[Mark Sawyer]

It's all a lie. There is no black-and-white photography. It's all just shades of grey...

[domenico Foschi]

Abstraction doesn't necesserily means a lie.
It is an interpretation, a point of view.
After all every single living being perceives reality in a different manner from all others. I would love to put a camera on a cat's neck...

[Bill_1856]

Q (to Walker Evans in interview.): Do photographs ever lie?
A: Always!

[John Kasaian]

I think time must also be a consideration. The trees in question looked like the trees you photographed when you tripped the shutter, and that it is what your photograph illustrates. While two photographers tripping shutters at the exact same time from the same perspective and at the exact same subject will still look sllightly different, the resulting photos, if exposed and developed identically, should still look quite a bit alike.

Consider a scene on which you immediately invest a second sheet of film. It is the same suject you've just shot and your hope and intention is getting a duplicate image(unless of course its a basketball game---theres usually not much lf going on at basketball games ;) )

[Donald Qualls]

Writing fiction has been described as "telling true stories that never happened." IMO, photography, and especially B&W photography, is much the same. Each image (absent manipulations of the "fabrication" school -- which stretch definitions a little in a couple directions) shows a truth, regardless whether that truth was actually before the photographer at the moment of exposure. I just read through "Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs" in the last few weeks; apparently, Adams had to go through some process to get the appearance of those trees, and people tend not to see what's actually in the photograph even when standing in front of it. The same is surely true of your version -- both that you had to make choices in exposure, processing, and printing on what version of reality you would present, and that people viewing your print don't see what you printed, much less what you saw when you were there with your camera.

FWIW, I usually like the "truth" of a B&W photograph better than the original scene -- I guess that's part of why I've chosen to return to B&W in an era when, in most formats, color is both easier and cheaper.