It's all a lie. There is no black-and-white photography. It's all just shades of grey...
It's all a lie. There is no black-and-white photography. It's all just shades of grey...
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...
Q (to Walker Evans in interview.): Do photographs ever lie?
A: Always!
Wilhelm (Sarasota)
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)
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
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.
If a contact print at arm's length is too small to see, you need a bigger camera. :D
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