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.