Orginality is over rated
Orginality is over rated
... indeed - and probably also "a bourgeois concept". Because besides "I like it/don't like" and several obvious technical aspects (not sharp, nice tones etc.) they make really weak and uneducated criteria for evaluating a photograph.
However, if you offer the same view on the world as someone before you, and there is little new about, yeah it's boring for the viewer and hard to become a genuinely great photograph.
Other visual arts have been evolving for thousands of years, and continue to evolve. Photography has been evolving for only 175 years. In just my lifetime innovative people have created ultra high speed photography, light meters, zoom lenses, instant photography, practical color film, digital photography, and more. Such new tools have opened new opportunities for innovative photographers. The internet has blessed you youngsters with opportunity to access countless photographs. It can be good to base one's photography on what has been done. With this for inspiration and with the rich variety of old and new tools, there is little limit to what you might accomplish. Go for it.
I like that Jim, and I would add, new photographic developments are occurring very quickly. We have no idea what we will be using in 10, 20, 30 years as state of the art photography, it's corollary printing and any other method of transferring image to minds eye.Originally Posted by Jim Jones
We already can show an image to a blind person by hot wiring directing inside the head. No eyes needed.
I anticipate vast developments in image transfer from conception, to capture to sharing.
I hope I get to 'see' them!
Tin Can
Snow Angels, yea there's millions of them but how many are LF?
One thing I like to do is take ordinary everyday photographs with the 4x5, which (I hope) makes them a little different than "everyone else's".
Even if I'm not successful at creating photographs with universal appeal, the approach gives me many personal photographs.
Just to underline Bill's comment, I find that most photographers (I'm talking about serious photographers but it applies universally) tend to "cluster" around certain ideas or looks. I think of it in astronomical terms where you might have a bunch of galaxies all mashed together and then these vast spaces in between. Think of the black and white homeless dude portraits in the video--that *look.* You see the same thing in LF landscape, too. Lot sod clustering in the high end art world with deadpan portraits. And on and on. And still all those unexplored spaces in between...
--Darin
Giving voice.
Photography, image making-image sharing can give voice to forgotten or mundane items most members of humanity would pass by without notice. A few weeks ago, we took a walk around the neighborhood, I dragged around a Cannon Digital with a wide angle zoom. As the steps passed and side walk gone by, the choice was made to give voice to items on the street that were used, abused, forgotten, neglected. Here is one image from that walk.
Giving voice to items, individuals or places is just one of the ways of sharing photography / image making can do.
Historically, painting-art has been about creating images, sculptures and art objects to preserve or present socially significantly individuals, deities or others worthy of artistic interpretation. In time, this evolved to individual expression and eventually abstract art where it is up to the viewer to interpret or decide what the art work is about. Art is much about the human expression of a moment of time. There is much that can be told about human history, it's environment, it's interaction with the world from a different place in human history.
Rather than ask if all photos or videos are the same, consider what is art and what makes the difference between snap shots -vs- artistic expression be it an image, video, film, sculpture, mobile or ...
Bernice
Bernice, your image of "street refuse" immediately brought to mind Irving Penn's series of images of detritus, not only made with a large format camera, but beautifully platinum printed, to give "voice" to what we humans discard. But unfortunately what that series does for me is to take your well articulated comments about art, and respond, "you have just underlined the truth of this thread, all our images are the same." And that type of image also brings to mind Jules Feiffer's play "Little Murders" where one character is a photographer who achieves fame photographing dog droppings. So again, the general concept of the image you posted is in fact already common enough for satire. I have to return to my original premise that for most of us, the reward of photography is the process, rather than the uniqueness of the image. And the fact that someone else has had an idea does not mean that the idea was not new to us when we first expressed it.
We've been moving into an artistic era which places greater emphasis on invention than inspiration. As a result, novelty has started to become more important than beauty.
When someone likes something today, they call it "cool", meaning that it is clever and imaginative. This is a mental rather than an emotional evaluation.
Even so, novelty fades while beauty is eternal.
Beauty is in the mind of the beholder, as is art.
Tin Can
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