Originally Posted by
Brian C. Miller
Bullshit. The subject matter is the image on the film, or rather, what is on the final print. And no, I can't ask Avedon, because he's dead.
Sure, everybody photographs the same thing differently.
Thought experiment: imagine I make a still life that can be shipped around the world and everybody can photograph it. Here's the setup: a cardboard box with a piece of paper on top for diffuse light, a hole with a clear piece of plastic over it in the side for the camera lens, and a wooden ball glued into a corner. (Like a Fabrege egg, but cheap and ugly.) The box is big enough that an 8x10 with 300mm lens can focus on the ball. Each photograph must have at least part of the ball visible, and the lens (or lens hood) must be pressed up against the box.
How many ways are there to uniquely photograph that using a view camera?
Now, let's say that 100 of us photograph the still life, and produce 50 prints. That's 5000 prints. Shuffle them. Now, how many unique ideas are there? How many can be readily grouped together? How many Ansel and Earl prints are there? How many would form "a body of work?" How much composition was in the camera? How much composition was in the enlarger?
And at the end of it, the theme of this experiment is that we've stopped looking at a ball glued into the corner of a box. It has all gone awry. The subjects we are trying to see are the photographers, who aren't the subject of a photograph. The photographer isn't in the photograph, but outside the photograph. We don't really know much about the photographers. All we have are 5000 goofy prints, which are headed for a landfill.
A photographer may be the subject of a competition, but the subject of a photograph is what's in the image.
Bookmarks