"Theory of Film" made some wonderful points.

[Robert McClure]

Thirty years ago I dreamed of becoming a (motion picture) filmaker. I was later to discover that something about the whole thing made me sick in my gut. It wasn't until years later I realized that, for me, motion picture had been filled with a kind of fraudulence. Not only the caste system of the entertainment business and all the associated nonsense, but the idea if filming actors portraying those whom they were really not. Documentary (and cinema verite) was ok, but even that seemed to lack any real power.

I read "Theory of Film," then. The author had subtitled his book, "The Redemption of Physical Reality." He talked about the strength of the camera (he meant cine, but comments were applicable to still generally, and especially ULF, I think).

Krackaur said he thought dramatic film was merely a recording of persons pretending to be other persons. This, he said, was not pure cinema. A kind of misuse or (my word) a prostitution of the camera. (I cannot help but think of the photo-pictorialist movement which Alfred Stieglitz had so wanted to break away from.

Krackaur said that the camera had early on seemed to instinctively wind up in the " street." That was where the life and energy. True, he was talking from the perspective of motion. Moving people, animals, wagons.

But he referred to the camera's ability to redeem what the eye and brain had seemed to miss. He called it (German translated to English) "plastic beauty." And he spoke about redeeming this reality. That's where I believe that I and others fit in.

I find that the beauty of the sheer physical material I am surrounded by is absolutely pregnant with amazing and wonderful possibilities. If it were not for the camera, we would be "stuck" with eye and brain only. I need, of course, to remember the painters, too. Didn't Stieglitz feature photographs and paintings in gallery exhibitions?

Man, when I find the scene I want to photograph my pulse quickens. Then I hope I can translate to shades of gray in two-dimentional space some of what was happening for me at the time my eye and brain experienced it. As others have said, if someone can make what is private public, then perhaps "art" has been created.

Always fun to try to talk intelligently about something that the human intellect is not capable wrapping itself around.

[Bill_1856]

Stieglitz was in great part responsible for the acceptance of "pictoralism" as the ultimate expression of the photographic process, despite the fact that his own photographs were not in that genre. It took 40 years of LIFE Magazine to reverse that Victorian abortion of good taste.

[tim atherton]

Robert, I've often been very taken by John Bergers writings on art (and some times strongly disgareed with them!) - but what you say resonates with me and with some of the things Berger writes about photogrpahy in Another Way of Telling, along with some of his shorter essays.

But by chance, last night, I read another essay of his in Keeping a Rendezvous called Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye - this is all about film/cinema (as well as comparisons to painting and photography) and while it takes a slightly different tack from what you say aboiuve, it certainly seemed to echo some of the ideas and emotions in your piece.

[Donald Qualls]

My opinion only, but...

Film (of the commercial, "go to a movie" variety) is almost all fiction. So are many of the best books ever written. If you can't stand the untruth of fiction, you need to be very careful what you read -- even some photography texts seem more intent on selling a bill of goods than on conveying "Truth" in its pure form (which I'm not certain I'd know if it bit me on the arse, but that's another discussion).

Don't ever forget that the "untrue" process of entertainment cinema has financed most of the advances in film and developers over the past century, forced the creation of the exposure rules that were simplified to become the Zone System -- and just incidentally made documentary film possible (if documentary were the only use of film, newsreels would still be shot on B&W with hand cranked cameras and television would still be live).

If you can't stand to make fictional films, no problem. But do be aware that "redeeming reality" (as strongly epitomized by Ansel Adams with his analogy of the negative as the score and the print as the performance, and his lifelong enthusiasm for embellishing the performance) is no less an act of creating a fiction than is filming actors speaking lines in the voices of people who don't exist.

Fiction sells a lot better than truth. If art doesn't sell, it's a hobby -- and hobbies don't create trillion dollar industries that can drive a whole technology for a century.

[paulr]

"Stieglitz was in great part responsible for the acceptance of "pictoralism" as the ultimate expression of the photographic process, despite the fact that his own photographs were not in that genre."

He was actually a hardcore pictorialist. His work didn't shift to modernism until many years after he first started calling it modern, well after Paul Strand's work (which he championed) helped usher in photographic modernism.

I think calling that whole movement an abortion of good taste goes a bit far. you might make a case that pictorialism overstayed its welcome by a few years.

I wonder what Krakauer would say about theatre? Just a bunch of people pretending to be someone else?

[domenico Foschi]

I am astounded of how still there are people and movements that try to box the creative realm in a little box.
And then again I am a supporter of the idea that we need this tension.
One of the first things I learned as a photographer was that if you have 1000 photogrpahers shooting the same subject, you will have 1000 different photographs.
Robert , if you and me look at a polished stone, how can you be sure that the subject is percieved by both of us in the same manner with the same intention of presenting it in a realistci fashion?
You could probably be attracted by the light quality giving it a certain shape and I could be enthusiastic instead of the relationship the stone has with its surroundings.
Oscar wilde said :" No great artist ever see things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist."
Another of his statements:"Art never express anything but itself. It has an indipendent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines....and he goes on saying: All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them to ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, before they are of any real srvice to Art, they must be translated into artistic conventions.
The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything.
Life imitates art far more than Art imitates Life.
Now it may sound that Wilde himself is trying to box the concept of Art, but my perception is instead that it is giving to its terminology a broader meaning .

[tim atherton]

Further to Domenico,

what our little boxes capture is appearances - not the truth, not reality. Just the outward or visible aspect of something. Only what our eyes (and the camera see). That may or may not be true. It may or may not be real. Whether it is or not is entirely indpenedent of our sense of sight (and of our cameras way of "seeing").

Appearances are in the realm of the senses and photography in the end only deals with appearances. What is real (reality) exists independantly of our human awareness of our senses(and is usually beyond what our cameras can see and what our film can record).

When we take a photograph, what we end up with is how something looks to us - to the photographer. That's all.

[domenico Foschi]

And, if I shoot a rock in B/W , that in itself is an abstraction.

[Brian C. Miller]

"Krackaur said he thought dramatic film was merely a recording of persons pretending to be other persons. This, he said, was not pure cinema. A kind of misuse or (my word) a prostitution of the camera."

Yeah, and...? Of course dramatic film is a recording of people pretending to be other people. People pretending to be other people has been going on since man first formed thought! That's what theater is all about. Duh! Same thing goes for fiction, an author writes about what does not exist.

But is that "prostitution" of the camera? Or of the stage? Or of the printed page?

I think that it has nothing to do with misuse of anything. I consider that to be a completely bogus statement. What concepts are you arguing for or against? Are you arguing against the very concept of fiction? That anything should be used in the persuit of fiction? I don't know what you read, but I like Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice. Excellent science fiction, that one. I would never complain if that were made into a film.

How is this "plastic beauty" a redemption by the camera? I will lay odds that my concept of beauty may radically differ from yours. I ride the bus a lot. I see a lot of motion, and not much of it is worth two frames of 8mm. I fail to see the beauty of some snearing foul-mouthed graffiti-writing young miscreant who verbally abuses other passengers. I fail to see beauty of the actors actively live to strip beauty from the world around them. This is the motion of the street. There isn't much beauty to many lives, because those who live those lives actively foul their own lives and try to foul the lives of those around them.

I do see the beauty of those who actively help those around them. Lending a hand or giving a dollar to a stranger. Righting an overturned trash can. Picking up a discarded newspaper. The things that nobody will reward, yet they do it regardless of recognition.

Does "plastic beauty" simply refer to anything in a camera's focus? And why call beauty plastic? The word "plastic" has many definitions. Which one is used here? Formative and creative? Moldable and adaptable? Or made of plastic, mass-produced, cheap and fake? Leo Tolstoy complained of counterfeit art. Is that what is captured by the camera?

Much of modern art focuses on cheap and fake beauty. No photo in my neighborhood has any bearing on world hunger. None of it. If you want there to be photographs of world hunger, grab your kit, hop a plane, and go photograph it. And does any of that alleviate world hunger? No. Photographs do not feed. What beauty is there in photographs of neighborhood trash bags? What beauty is there in 3,000+ cell phones? Are these pictures you would pay for and hang them on your wall? If there was no name attached to that photograph, no cult of personality, would you do it? I bet not. As artworks, I find such photographs boring and banal.

I think that fiction, when done well, lifts the spirit and sparks the mind. How does the camera, a little machine whose nature is fixed on a reproduction of the real, create fiction? It is by the artifice of the operator and the perception of the viewer. I don't consider this to be a bad thing. Lifting up another's spirit is wonderful. Sparking someone's imagination is excellent. When asked how to make children smarter, Albert Einstein answered, "Read them fairy stories."

Robert, would you consider those fairy stories to be a misuse and prostitution of a medium? I do not. It is with our imagination that we can turn life's lemons into lemonade, given a little sugar.

[Steven Barall]

There is nothing about photography that is indexical in nature. Every photo is purely subjective. There is nothing real about a two dimensional grey scale photo that is a size that can be hung on a wall.

Pictorialism is just as real as anything else in the world of photography. To say that there is objective reality in photography is to say that there are universal truths in photography. There is no truth here.

There are not unsharp lenses and sharp lenses, there are just unsharp lenses. That's what filmmaking is. Film makers know that they are trying to fool you and you know it also. There is no dishonesty there at all. It's all a manipulation which is also what photography is.

Photos are the result of decisions. The great photographers are the ones that are able to make the decisions necessary to "make" the photos no matter what the light is bouncing off of, whether its a cloud floating by or the loose body parts strewn about at the scene of a bombing.

[Paul Fitzgerald]

Robert,

"Thirty years ago I dreamed of becoming a (motion picture) filmaker. I was later to discover that something about the whole thing made me sick in my gut. It wasn't until years later I realized that, for me, motion picture had been filled with a kind of fraudulence. Not only the caste system of the entertainment business and all the associated nonsense, "

Buy a MacG5 and a digicam and have at it, it is to Hollyweird what mp3 is to the music industry, scaring the hell out of them.

"but the idea if filming actors portraying those whom they were really not. Documentary (and cinema verite) was ok, but even that seemed to lack any real power. "

This I don't understand, anyone over 5 years old is an actor playing charades, we all put on the armor as a defense.

Nice thread though.

[Robert McClure]

Thanks Bill and Paulr. I am mistaken about Stieglitz relative to pictorialism. I have long understood, and perhaps incorrectly, that he wanted to move away from this. I think of "The Steerage" (AS?) as well as the vertical shot of the horsedrawn cabs in the NY snow early 1900's. That's who I think of when I think of Alfred Stieglitz.

I, for one, could benefit from one of you or anyone else explaining generally how the transition was made from photo-pictorialism to realism. Who were the players? What did they do? I had thought Stieglitz had really railed against pictorialism.

Brian Miller, my post really seemed to touch a nerve in you. I was not minimizing dramatic cinema. Just citing my recollections of what the author's positions had been. Krackauer had been a kind of purist, and thought that dramatic film tended to ignore (or fail to exploit) what he saw as the real strength of the camera. He believed that strength was the camera's ability to reveal (in two-dimensional abstraction) the inherent beauty of the material that was actually out there.

Put another way, and I think he was also saying this, eye/brain see one kind of "reality." Eye/brain (when viewing the abstracted image hewn from the original "reality") can see something different - or, one might say, what was "really" there in the first place. Of course, as one of you seemed to say, it's all abstraction. I guess one might include even the image registered by the optic nerve.

I guess what I have been trying to say is that I find it a truly marvelous and exhilerating experience to expereince a piece of reality (a scene), to feel a kind of pulse-quickening exhileration, and to then click the shutter. Wow! It feels like I have participated in something that is way beyond me. Beyond my senses, my intellect. As though I have touched something eternal. A hundred pounds of gear so that I can have that experience. If a print seems to turn out well, that's more than I can ask for. It's the icing on the cake.

Brian, you should know that I am fond of dramatic film. It seems to have its own strengths, too.

A few things come to mind. (A 19 or 20-year-old) Lauren Bacall asking Humphrey Bogart, "You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? Just put your lips together and blow."

And to confirm I am definitely not high-brow in my tastes, how about Jessie Ventura's comment to his sidekick in that first Schwartzeneggar "killing aliens" picture. (With a sizeable wad of chew in his cheek) "... sons-of-bitches are dug in deeper than an Alabama tick."

Cheers to all!!

[Brian C. Miller]

Yes, Robert, it touched a nerve in me, and its a good nerve to touch! :-)

I used to have philosophical debates with Chris Jordan on Usefilm's "Philosophy of Photography" forum. I like exercising my mental philosophical muscles!

Yeah, I can see that you were discussing Krackaur. If I don't see a phrase like "I don't agree with this guy" when you reference him, then I presume agreement. Debates of philosophy are only relevant when one references one's own viewpoint, not the viewpoint of somebody else. Another person's viewpoint can be used to reinforce your own, but its boils down to BS if you aren't working to hone your own vision, to forge your own path.

I agree with you that the camera (and print) are used to focus attention. This is what we do every time the shutter goes "click." I think we both seek the extraordinary in the ordinary.

I simply disagree (and how!) that using film to express a fairy tale is a bad thing. We need better fairy tales.

[Brian C. Miller]

Steven Barall wrote: "To say that there is objective reality in photography is to say that there are universal truths in photography. There is no truth here."

Nihilism (http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htm), the corrosive acid which seeks to destroy all! Phah!

There can be objective reality in photography, and universal truths can be conveyed by photography. It is the photographer's choice to choose the subject and render it according to personal vision. If you don't want to convey truth, then you won't persue it or photograph it.

Many of my photographs contain this universal truth: This, too, shall pass away. When you seek a universal truth, you will find it. If you seek that truth in a photographical context, you will capture it on film. Seek and you will find, and if you ain't seekin', you ain't findin'!

History shows again and again
How nature points up the folly of men
-- from Go Go Godzilla, by Blue Oyster Cult

[paulr]

"I am mistaken about Stieglitz relative to pictorialism. I have long understood, and perhaps incorrectly, that he wanted to move away from this. I think of "The Steerage" (AS?) as well as the vertical shot of the horsedrawn cabs in the NY snow early 1900's. That's who I think of when I think of Alfred Stieglitz."

You're definitely in good company. Most of the world thought Stieglitz's work was modern long before it was, because Stieglitz said it was, and he was almost supernaturally convincing. by the early 1900s, his work was straight, but was still heavily romantic and symbolic. His work from the previous two decades was basically pictorial. He didn't become truly modern until he was in his fifties, and was learning from the example of artists like strand and sheeler and the european painters.

In an interview, Beaumont Newhall was asked why he called Stieglitz's pictorialist pictures from the 19th century straight. Newhall said something like, "well, he told me they were straight and i believed him."

You're definitely right that Stieglitz wanted to move away from the victorian esthetic. He talked about doing so publicly and in print. It just happened to take his work a long time to catch up with his ideas.

[paulr]

"Many of my photographs contain this universal truth: This, too, shall pass away. When you seek a universal truth, you will find it. If you seek that truth in a photographical context, you will capture it on film. Seek and you will find, and if you ain't seekin', you ain't findin'!"

Can we really say that the photograph contains these truths, or does it just contain signs that people from certain cultures or groups have learned to read a certain way? I wonder, once you get past pictures of the most base human emotions ... smiling faces, pain, fear, etc... how many of the pictures with a meaning we agree on here would mean the same thing to someone uneducated in the medium, or to an African villager, or to a European from 17th Century.

Or for that matter, how many of us right here would agree on what that picture means. This, too, shall pass away? Maybe some people will see that, but I promise some others will see something different. Which suggests that photographs contain something more like "loosely shared implications" than universal truths.

[Brian C. Miller]

Ah, but Paul, I can aim for the photograph to contain that truth, can't I? :-) And showing a photograph to "a European from 17th Century" is a bit out of the question, isn't it? (Unless you have a time machine, in which case get on the Art Bell show as soon as you can!)

[paulr]

You can definitely aim for the truth ... and if you aim well, you'll capture something that reads like the truth to yourself and to others who share the same iconography. Nothing wrong with that ... it's been keeping art alive since the beginning. It's just easy to overlook that that the truth actually hasn't been trapped in that emulsion. The image typically contains a bunch of richly ambiguous, open-ended fragments. We who make and look at the image complete the sense of truth with our cultural contexts. Recognizing this helps ease the frustration when someone sees our work and thinks it's about something bizarrely unrelated to the truth we chased.

As soon as the time machine is up and running, I'll be taking orders for $5 Stieglitz prints, turn-of-the-century platinum paper, and vintage fender guitars. Who really cares what those old fops have to say about my pictures?

[Darin Cozine]

It makes me laugh when people talk about truisms in photography. Discussions like this seem to polarize people and instill arguments about hair-counters vs. holgas, digital vs. darkroom, this vs. that.

I have seen the capitol-T-Truth used also. Like it was a diction from a higher power. Photography is not truth anymore than abstract art is a lie. Neither is documentary cinema truth and fiction lies. No documentary can make you wholly understand expeience. No photograph can tell you who is the real person behind the face. No reality TV show will make you understand what it is like to be Paris Hilton.

I think most people are confused about what art is. Art simply a form of communication. Whether it be documentary or contrived, the idea is to communicate some aspect of life to another. A good photograph may give you a hint of a personality, a representation on how hard/good life was at a certain time, or the sense of enchantment in a secret location. But none can comapre with the experience.

You might say that the only 'Truth' is in knowing. That is a very Tao expression, but I think it fits well regarding art. So I will accept the actors, the contrived reality, the embellished page, just as I would a voice in a conversation.