The relevance of “How will my photo make others feel?”

[Struan Gray]

Jesus, Struan, you made me read that before I had any coffee. I'm going to get revenge for that.

"When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode."

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men.


Obphoto: it's a short hop from the wild bruins of Greenland's icy mountains, to the Tay Bridge Disaster, to James Valentine and photos like this:

http://212.20.233.42/index.php/colle...sults/0/34484/

Cherry pick the Valentine company archive, and you can make a good case that he, rather like Carlton Watkins, was a modernist before his time. Look at the work as a commercial whole and he comes across as much more conventional and ordinary. Something similar is done with Disfarmer portraits and other 'found' archives like the Vivian Maier one.

If photography is at least partly about selecting and pointing, there is no reason why it cannot be meta-photography and select from an archive of photos, or point to parts of impersonal image databases like Google Street View. Or my own negative files.

I photograph for myself. But I edit for others. The rhetorical element is never entirely absent - at the very least there is the 'look at this!' cry - and once I have started to think about what my photographs might mean to others and how best to encourage the sort of reading I feel is important, it is very hard not to carry on thinking about those issues when out in the field making new photographs. Which is not to say I go hunting for crowd pleasers, but rather that my choice of where to go hunting, and when, has been biased by my musings and background reading about the photographs I have already taken.

I start out naive, but I know that many of the patterns and relationships that end up in my photos have been studied and catalogued, often extensively. That's where the male black widow bit comes in - using specialist knowledge as feedback to refine what I already find visually interesting. Sometimes I will take a photo to illustrate a technical issue, but usually it's the other way round: the background information reinforces my photographic instinct that something is worth recording. And then I try to find ways of (gently, obliquely) letting viewers know that I, and they, are not just neonates with newly opened eyes and a curiosity for everything bright and pretty, but thinking, rational observers who can extract meaning from what we see, on all kinds of levels and with varying degrees of balance between scientific and artistic curiosity.


Sorley MacLean is supposedly untranslatable - Gaelic speaking friends shake their heads in the same way that Russians insist on the impossibility of truly appreciating Pushkin in English - so I don't know how much the formal aspects of that stanza are forced by the change of tongue. There is a strong, capital-R, Romantic element in the Scots Gaelic I have encounted in translation from poems and song lyrics, but what I like about MacLean is how he treats the landscape of the Highlands as a place to live, not a place to visit. So much of the discovery of Nature from the Romantics onwards, including nearly all the the current wave of 'New Nature' writing, is about city dwellers going on holiday in the wilderness. I like the local's view better, even if I experience it third hand.


There is no single thing that is photography, even art photography, but I do think that a certain amount of conscious packaging and framing is a good tactic once you start to show your work to others. The naive approach is still an approach, and a chosen one at that.

My own trajectory has headed back towards combinations of words and pictures, which I know goes against standard gallery presentations, and the whole idea of the standalone work of art, but which has its own canonical antecedents, and which satisfies me even more than the pictures alone.

[paulr]

Struan, I couldn't get that link to work.

I like the remark that you shoot for yourself, edit for others. That's probably somewhat analogous to my own approach. Likewise the holes you're poking in the idea of "naive" photography.

I called my approach naive in comparison to the narrator in the spider story, who knew to the last detail the significance of what he was pointing to. It's at this level specifically where generally I let myself be led by what I don't completely grasp.

On translation, the poet Robert Hass likes to call translated poems "versions" created by the translator, almost as if the original poem is a kind of template, and the translation is a new work built in part from it and in part from the world and sensibilities of the translator.

There was a web project last year (I lost the link) of poets who each offered their own transation / version of the same non-english poem. A new one each month.

I have no doubt that Pushkin's work is untranslateable, in any pure sense. I would say the same thing about any good poem. Or photograph. Paraphraseability tells me that the language of the medium has not been used to its potential.

[Dennis]

Art/photography is communication. Sometimes you communicate with yourself and sometimes you communicate with others. I think it is good to have some idea of what you are communicating and to whom.
I also notice in conversations that communications can be reduced to three categories, sharing information, trying to make someone think something about yourself, trying to make someone think something about himself.
I think going through life unconcerned with any perception but your own is also known as having your head up your butt.
Dennis

[Struan Gray]

The same photo is on Luminous Lint here:

http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/ima...3993360492159/

It's also (in better reproduction) in the excellent book "A companion guide to photography in the national galleries of Scotland"

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Companion-Ph...8325276&sr=1-1


I didn't take your self description to mean some kind of absolute naive state. Often I notice things that don't fit, or are subtly out of the ordinary. Sometimes that's because I already know all about a subject and so can see the significance of a minor detail (the Sherlock Holmes approach to photography). More often, I analyse my reaction in the light of subsequent research, which is just as likely to reveal things about myself and my prejudices as about the thing photographed.

An example of the first would be finding a lump of green soapstone with faint traces of iron fittings on our favourite Scottish beach. Almost certainly left there by a viking.

An example of the latter is many of my wildflower photographs, which start out as pure patterns but which often evolve into illustrations of landscape ecology, particularly succession processes in former farmland.

[Struan Gray]

I have no doubt that Pushkin's work is untranslateable, in any pure sense. I would say the same thing about any good poem. Or photograph. Paraphraseability tells me that the language of the medium has not been used to its potential.

I agree, but this implies you have to make a choice between the size of your audience and the fullness of your language potential utilisation.

[paulr]

I agree, but this implies you have to make a choice between the size of your audience and the fullness of your language potential utilisation.

I don't know about that. I wouldn't even know how to make that choice.
It's interesting that in popular music people seem fine with obscurity / abstraction / indeterminacy. Like in the Beatles' "I am the Walrus" or "Come together." Or flat out surrealism / psychedelia, as in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

I only mention one band because they were more influential than anyone, but you'll have no trouble finding similar plays with language all over the ensuing decades.

But for some reason in poetry and in cinema, mass audiences seem to insist on a specific kind of clarity, typically a clarity of message. This includes a determinate stance toward what the thing means, and often some kind of clear narrative, a clear identity of the voice that's speaking, and clearly laid out setting in the world.

In photography, people talk about message clarity, but I don't often see them attempting it or insisting on it. The rhetoric is held over from the early 20th century (it's all about communicating the photographer's "feelings" in no uncertain terms). But I'd challenge anyone group of people to look at a selection of Weston's or Strand's or Stieglitz's images and to agree on the feelings being communicated. The work is wonderfully open-ended, even if the rhetoric surrounding it is closed and dumb.

Edited to add: I just saw an argument that the vanguard of weirdness today is occupied by children's t.v... I don't doubt it, after witnessing the Teletubbies for 30 seconds once. I fled the room, with feelings like ones described by people convinced they'd been probed by aliens.

[rallys]

Keeping this mind set will merit you some things as you are gearing toward viewer appreciation. Some enthusiasts I know just keep it to themselves and just feed their hunger for shooting.

And with this audience centric attitude, you will soon realize that you will get far more credits than you initially thought of. But there are still those who would be even happier with recognition, even just limited, who would appreciate what an art is for a person.

[DrTang]

sometimes a lot..sometimes zero


I take Photographs for myself always, but included in that might be my enjoyment of other people's reaction...either positive or negative

In this light, let’s say you’re composing a shot...

Why is it important to consider what others will think & feel about your image?

Or, is this not really an important or meaningful consideration for you?

Does a “consideration of others” help your creativity, or hinder it?