CNN Photography article

[Kirk Gittings]

Pretty old news IMO. Overall I think, worrying about where you fit into contemporary photographic practice is a stumbling block in and of itself. You become a photographer serving an amorphous fickle and petty client. Just do what you do and let others worry about whether you fit the current trend or not.

[Mark Sawyer]

Meanwhile the header picture of the article sadly features a picture that won an "art" competition - and belongs in the den of a modern day Bonanza ranch - on velvet!!

I suspect there are as many paintings on velvet as there are photographs on gelatin silver paper hanging in the homes of the world, and the respective owners appreciate both...

That was a photograph??

As much as one done on Velvia, with its "world-class levels of image color saturation and vibrancy", (from Fujifilm's ad copy).

It seemed to me the article was caught between condemning digital manipulation as "easy art", then justifying it in the hands of "real artists" defined as "award-winning commercial photographers":

Some photographers have thrown every filter and post-processing technique at a photo and called the result art.

The problem was that the images themselves, the backbone of the art presented, weren't great to begin with, said award-winning commercial photographer David Allan Brandt. Technology was expected to make the mediocre extraordinary.

After that, it wandered through seemingly unrelated photographs with blurb artist statements, with no real point in mind beyond the process is part of photography, somewhat, sometimes, for some people...

[Vaughn]

...Just do what you do and let others worry about whether you fit the current trend or not.

Right on!

And I am trying hard not to get involved with, or be influenced by, the current trend of negativity on the LFPF. Photography is such a joy!

Vaughn

[Jerry Bodine]

Just do what you do and let others worry about whether you fit the current trend or not.

Kirk, that's pretty clear thinking. I couldn't have summed it up any better.

Vaughn, you responded while I was typing. We are both on the same frequency it seems.

[Frank Petronio]

Great statement Kirk!

[Mark Sawyer]

Pretty old news IMO. Overall I think, worrying about where you fit into contemporary photographic practice is a stumbling block in and of itself. You become a photographer serving an amorphous fickle and petty client. Just do what you do and let others worry about whether you fit the current trend or not.

Agreed, and I'd add that this particular client has a reputation for not paying his bills, and won't respond to emails...

[RichardSperry]

And HDR is compared to Ansel's burning and dodging which sounds like a cheap attempt to grab cred.

Well it's really doing the same thing, isn't it. Putting the dynamic range where you want it, instead of where it is.

You can't tell that Adams' stuff is all completely photoshopped, unless you know that it is. The best HDR work is going to be unnoticeable as well.

Not like the cartoons in the article's sample of images. Bad HDR is readily recognizable, you don't know that the good stuff is.

I would put a lot of Nat Geo's 'velvia', over saturated, stuff in the HDR group. Completely unnatural, and pretty distracting. But that's what we, as consumers, wanted. I have long not considered NG as journalism as much as it is a pretty picture magazine, with the addendum of self loathing or guilt. Some spokesperson from that organization pretending to be a purest is funny.

[gth]

Finding anything really incisive about photography trends on the front page of CNN.com is probably a tall order in the first place.

Certainly it is true that any real artist better use their own flashlight to guide them. But it is also true across art history that trends come up and are discernible and artist follow them (more or less), driven by peer influence, technology, world events or "what sells". Hence the moderate interest in this article.....

I don't know, and can't judge if the "trends" delineated in the article are "true" ..... the people quoted probably do believe what they say..

What I came away with was

A. that the enormous strides in digital image manipulation will lead to an abstractive and expressionistic trend in fine art photography and

B. A sort of "pendelum swings back" movement toward appreciation and perhaps use of older techniques and a willful avoidance of digital manipulation and use of "organic" analog photography.

Both make a certain amount of sense to me...... but I could be interpreting the article (and certainly reality) wrong.

Far as how the photography "market" actors handle the profound change in photographic technology the last 10 years, I am sure that is occupying a lot of smart, professional minds, from educators to gallery owners... that fact it has not gelled, or is confusing does not mean they are incompetent. By and large....

[Mike Anderson]

The photo of the lake is also dipped in the lake water.

Too cute.

[Brian Ellis]

Well it must have started with at least three..... Bull & rider, landscape, sky etc...

Anyhow, skilled work I suppose.... I could not do it... But it's not a "photograph" by any sense of common meaning.

Jerry Uelsman has devoted his career to combining multiple photographs in a single image. Uelsman is certainly considered to be a photographer and his images are considered to be photographs. Bruce Barnbaum combined two photographs to create the image that's on the cover of his book "The Art of Photography." I'm pretty sure Bruce would tell you that his image is a photograph. Those are just two examples that quickly come to mind of photographers who combine multiple images to create a single image into something that I think has always been thought to be a photograph.

You may think their work is better than the bull rider. I certainly do. But in terms of what constitutes a photograph in common meaning, I see no difference between the bull rider photograph and the work done by Uelsman, Barnbaum, and many others who for more than a century have been combining multiple photographs into a single image.