Is “sympathy w/ your subject” a blessing ― or a curse?

[paulr]

You can always spice it up with antipathy, apathy, or sociopathy.

[Heroique]

I think a photograph reveals the relationship of the photographer to the subject - and this is the expression that occurs. No connection to the subject means the viewer will [also] feel little connection. (Or a very superficial connection.)

Lenny’s remark reminds me that “sympathy w/ your subject” would be an interesting topic of debate for a two-person panel – an artist to the left, a journalist to the right. If they believed in the commonly accepted “rules” of their respective callings, the artist might explain why he cultivates sympathy, the journalist why he “keeps above it.” In the journalist’s case, one might be curious how he’d make his readers feel anything more than a superficial connection to his work. Or at least that should be one of the moderator’s follow-up questions.

You can always spice it up with antipathy, apathy, or sociopathy.

If it wasn’t already a “curse,” that would certainly make it one!

[Bill Burk]

You can always spice it up with antipathy, apathy, or sociopathy.

Good one paulr!

[Bill Burk]

When I think of having "sympathy" with my subject, I don't know if a viewer can tell the difference.

When I sit at the side of a stream for an hour, getting to know it or purely enjoying the experience... Then I take a photograph of the scene. I do it remembering the quality of the time I spent. Then I can say I had sympathy with my subject. The photograph I took is likely to be better than one that may be taken six feet downstream.

The curse is that we can physically photograph our subjects without any sympathy, and pull it off. Say I didn't have that hour and I walked to the stream and took that worse shot six feet downstream. It is likely to be a passable photograph.

Only I would remember the rush I was in, and it's this remembrance that might make it into the story I tell when showing the print. I'd rather have the story be that I was soaking in the moment and wanted to share it.

[pdmoylan]

If sympathy/empathy stops you from exploring your vision and producing a compelling result, then, assuming your objectives are the final image, it is a definite barrier. For me, it's better to seek out something visual, create something unique and powerful from it and leave humanistic emotions aside until after the image taking.

For me, this question is analagous to trying to experience music as a bystander as you are performing it. Having performed much music live, particuarly free form jazz, there are so very few chosen moments when instinct takes over from mental control and your playing merges with the experience of listening to it. A sort of out of body experience, so to speak.

If you are driven to produce images, it's like running a race without hearing or seeing the crowd in the stands rooting you on. IMHO, that focus is key to producing notable images. Imagine being distracted by your SO in the bleachers before or during a race. Total focus is really necessary for me. If you are wanting a more "complete" experience the physical barriers alone of taking images will keep that in check and unrealized. Imaging making is what you impose on the experience, not what you draw from it during the "taking".

Interesting topic.

[Lenny Eiger]

For me, the important idea is "resonance," not "sympathy," although the two are somewhat related. I seldom (if ever) complete the process of setting up my camera, finding a composition, and deciding on an exposure unless I feel compelled to make a photograph. I need to feel some sort of connection, an understanding of the subject. The energy needs to flow from the subject to me, and then back through the camera to the subject.

Dan, thanks for this. I am going to add "resonance" to my vocabulary when describing certain things. It will join presence, connection, intimacy, etc. (I think its better than connection.)

I think there are a lot of kinds of photography. There is a difference between a considered portrait and street shooting. The latter involves a quickness where resonance may not be possible. Whether one is spending time at a river like Bill or with a human being, that time is valuable. Walker Evans spent weeks studying the people he photographed in the South and the results are amazing.

I just saw a photo that won a competition. A young girl was in a cornfield looking away. Her look is totally bland and reveals nothing about her. The most interesting thing is the texture of the green corn leaves. This is post modernism, the pundits of which have decreed that people must not look at the camera. I think this conversation suggests that post modernism is already gone, that people actually want to have a conversation with what they are photographing, and want to share something beyond what something looks like. Perhaps during photographing we can get to pdmoylan's "chosen moment" and actually reveal something interesting. Perhaps even something deep.

Lenny

[Kirk Gittings]

I think a photograph reveals the relationship of the photographer to the subject - and this is the expression that occurs. No connection to the subject means the viewer will feel little connection. (Or a very superficial connection.)

My mentor used to ask, "At the end of the day what wisdom do you have to share with the rest of us?" If you haven't learned anything, or you haven't understood something about what you are photographing then you have nothing to pass along. Why should we look?

So, my answer to your question would be that its all about being present enough to "connect" to your subject. Perhaps that's what you mean by "sympathy".

Lenny

Well said Lenny.

[cosmicexplosion]

To be in sympathy to me means a state of cohesion.
But also given that connection a state of awe and reverence.
To live vicariously through the eyes of a photographic artists who operates from
a trained and focused state
Much like listening to music that elevates you emotionally.
When I see an amazing photograph
The values of the artist reinforce my own. Thus I am transfixed into a sympathetic state.

[Heroique]

Walker Evans spent weeks studying the people he photographed in the South and the results are amazing...

A delightful coincidence – Let us Now Praise Famous Men (photos by Walker Evans, writing by James Agee) is one of the books I had in mind in post #1 – a work in which “sympathy” or “resonance” w/ the subject (in this case, poor tenants in 1930’s cotton land) is what brings their work to life, what makes it succeed as imaginative art & social commentary.

Or so the book claims.

To underscore this point, the co-workers append to the book’s preface two famous quotes (attributing neither directly) and identify them, in an inconspicuous footnote, as representative of their two principal themes. The first is from Shakespeare: “Take physick, Pomp, expose thyself to feel what wretches feel...” etc. from King Lear; and the second is from Marx and Engels: “Workers of the world, unite and fight...” etc. Clearly, Evans and Agee append these quotes to show the importance of “sympathy” w/ the poor (their subject) from both the poetic and social points of view. I think the reader is taken to understand that Evans’ photos address the Shakespeare part, and Agee’s writing the Marx/Engels part. Let Us Praise Famous Men is, of course, more complex and satisfying than that.

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I can’t think of another work of photography (on any subject) that makes a more compelling argument for “sympathy w/ the subject.” Both the photos and the prose do, however, call to my mind Ruskin’s Modern Painters (a 19th-C work) and his lonely championship of Turner, the English painter who, Ruskin claims, succeeds due to the artist’s “sympathy” w/ his landscapes…

[Marizu]

When I think of having "sympathy" with my subject, I don't know if a viewer can tell the difference.

Yeah, I am aware of this. How many of you guys have been setting up a LF session, when you blast a couple of loose frames on digi just to check the lighting and they turn out looking better than the £25 of film that you subsequently blow?
In the old days, that was the curse where the film exposures never lived up to the Polaroid.

As a photographer of people, I am always conscious of what I am imposing upon the subject. Camera angles, contrast ratios, lens view angles all conspire to impress my will upon the portrait. For a long while, I have been thinking that if my stereotype (or should I call it empathy) of the subject (which I enhance using photographic devices) corresponds with the viewer's stereotype, then they will consider it to be a good portrait because is consonant with their expectations.
This is where we start looking in to working processes such as participative photography.