What makes a photo “deep”?

[Drew Wiley]

OK - but Muench for me is about the most impoverished LF photog I can think of in terms
of mystical depth. I've always thought of him as an extremely predictable calendar type.
Some cute motif in the foreground for stock appeal, with some distant object to create the
sense of depth, and oblivious to the boundaries of the shot, though he tried to improve that using imitating certain rote art schooly conventions. A wonderful popular illustrator
for Arizona Hwys etc, no doubt, but light years below Cezanne.

[Mark Sawyer]

Just curious – if you think an LF image has intellectual or emotional “depth,” what made you think so?

Pixies!

On a related note, just how objective is anyone’s sense of photographic depth?

By my example, not very...

[Kirk Gittings]

OK - but Muench for me is about the most impoverished LF photog I can think of in terms
of mystical depth. I've always thought of him as an extremely predictable calendar type.
Some cute motif in the foreground for stock appeal, with some distant object to create the
sense of depth, and oblivious to the boundaries of the shot, though he tried to improve that using imitating certain rote art schooly conventions. A wonderful popular illustrator
for Arizona Hwys etc, no doubt, but light years below Cezanne.

Wow to some degree I agree with you here Drew. We have disagreed enormously over Muench in the past. As much as I like his work I see it as very well done in its genre but more slick and commercial than "deep".

[Peter Lewin]

I'm not sure what the correct answer is, but a couple of the earlier posts bothered me. I don't think that being indelible is synonymous with being deep. If I mention Robert Capa's "Death in Spain" or Eddie Adam's Pulitzer-winning photo of the "Execution in Vietnam," most of you will instantly visualize the images (even if my titles aren't exactly right). We are fascinated by the photos because they deal with the most universal subject, death (we won't go into the question of whether Capa's image was staged, a debate amongst the experts), and we are attracted to them in the same way that most people are "attracted" to car wrecks. But I don't think I would call either of those photos "deep." It is simply that the subject matter is universal.

Similarly, every one of us can instantly visualize Ansel Adams's "Moonrise," Edward Weston's "Pepper No. x" (can't remember the correct number, but its irrelevant), and I'm not sure either of those is deep either.

I think "deep" is an intellectual property, as when we say someone is a "deep thinker." I find that much easier to identify in literature, I don't know if I've ever found it in a photograph. For that matter, I don't know if I've ever seen it in a painting or sculpture either. There are many qualities that we enjoy in the visual arts, such as form, color, flow, and in some art, motivation (visual puns were enjoyed by the surrealists), but, at least for me, not "deep."

[Mike Anderson]

Good question. When I think of a deep photo I think of Wynn Bullocks "Navigation Without Numbers".
http://www.afterimagegallery.com/bullocknavigation.htm

So what's deep about it? It's presents a story that's powerful but not fully formed. There's something important happening but I don't know quite what it is. And there's something witty about the title book off to the side, like a dry narrator oblivious to the subject of the narration. Totally deep.

[David R Munson]

"Deep" is something extremely difficult to nail down as a concept as applied to photography. One might as well ask what makes a photo good. Taste differs, disagreements are inevitable.

Now then, for *me* and I really only mean this in terms of what appeals to me, photographs I would regard as deep are those that tend to move me viscerally, those that draw me in and hold me there, having something more than I can put a name to or explain. A work of art of any kind that I would regard as deep is typically one that resonates with something from my personal experience or interpretation of life. For me, depth has a lot to do with the bigger questions in life and what it is to be human.

Some examples relevant to what I value in photography:

• Bill Henson's work picks up on fragile nuances of adolescence, moments of beauty frozen midair in the context of the turbulence of all the changes we go through at that stage of life, the painful interstitiality of it all. To me, that's deep.
• Nobuyoshi Araki balances so perfectly eros and thanatos, finding amazing moments of connection and revealing the underlying structures of conscious experience, delving deeply into the grasping-at-straws nature of sex and image and affection on the long slow slide to death.
• Gregory Crewdson isolates and suspends impossible moments, like a conceptually-transcendent film still that sums up everything all at once. His photos look like how I dream at night.
• Michael Levin's work has taught me things about time, about the potential for our normal way of looking at things to mislead us in how we assume the world around us is structured.
• Shomei Tomatsu has a sense for the spaces in between things, for approaching a subject indirectly, using means of inference to draw around the subject rather than pointing to it directly. That which surrounds what we see is often at least as important as the thing itself, and that's the extra dimension I get from his work.

What makes a photo deep? Depth. Something more than the immediate and obvious. Something that grabs hold of some part of you and shakes it until you stop dead and really, really look, not at it, but into it. And to me that applies to all sorts of creative media, we just happen to be talking about photography here. It could just as easily be applied to sculpture or music, for example. Lee Bontecou's work is deep for me. Bronze sculptures of kids playing in the park, not so much. Gorecki's third symphony and "Lateralus" by Tool are deep to me. Bieber is not.

[rdenney]

I'm not sure that being indelible is the same as being compelling. There are many images that strike awe or some other emotion in me even when they are familiar, but it's not the familiarity that causes that effect. One would think that familiarity would dilute it. That's not the same thing as being memorable. Warhol was opposed to the concept of depth in its entirety, but his soup cans are familiar, memorable, indelible, whatever. They are not that because their subject matter is universal, but rather because the subject matter is iconic.

But when I look at his soup cans, I go, "Okay, soup cans." His point is taken; let's move on.

In odd contrast, I can stare at a Pollack, and come back to it over and over again. I don't love it at all, and in fact at some level it offends me. I'd be hard-pressed to buy the notion that it has any meaning at all, let alone on multiple levels. But it is...compelling. It does not engender shallow or superficial thoughts the way Warhol's soup cans do. Much of the attention it commands is, "why does this work at all?" I never have an answer to that, but there is so little to the technique that the answer to that question has to be about me, and not about it. The sheer unconcern of it to my questions seems to me an aspect of its depth--it somehow forces me to bring my own. It just is, but I can't ignore it.

Moonrise is certainly Adams's most indelible image, and in many ways his most popular. And it commands the highest price. But of his other iconic works, his Monolith, the Face of Half Dome is the one I look at daily in my house (alas, on a NYGS poster). That photo never fails to do something to me. I don't really know what, and I don't know why.

C.S. Lewis called it joy. It had nothing to do with pleasure or happiness by his meaning, but rather some awakening at the spiritual level. He used that word to describe his response to the ancient literature that guided his professional life--the Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Old/Middle English fantasies, epics, and especially epic poetry. He first experienced it as a boy, reading the real literature in his father's library, as he explains in his book, Surprised by Joy. (Despite what made him famous, this concept was artistic, not religious, in his thinking.) Lewis also defined "art" (in his An Experiment in Criticism, also not religious) as that which pulls the artistic response from the receiver of that art. His definition of what separates the superficial from the deep was something that allowed repeated experience with no lessening of its emotional power on the reader. His example of superficial was the phrase, "bathed in a flood of silver moonlight" which he suggested would be accepted at face value by the unliterary and not reward deeper and further reflection because it left nothing further to find. His counter-example was Malory's "the Moon shone clear" (from L'Mort de Arthur), the simplicity of which commands involvement from the reader, over and over again (and which hits my thrill button). There is no formula, there is only what works.

Much music moves me deeply. What makes Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis as moving to me on the thousandth hearing as on the tenth? (I had trouble maintaining my composure when I heard the Philharmonia Orchestrra play it in London a few years ago--my first hearing of that work performed in person by a world-class orchestra, and a British one at that.) And what made the tenth far more powerful than the first? I have no idea. It is certainly not it's tonal color and melody, though they make it possible. Those are just the tools of expression, and what he expressed came from a deeper well. That part defies analysis, I think, and certainly by me. But Vaughan Williams himself describes his first experience of hearing Wagner, where he stayed up all night afterwards, but was unable to talk to anyone.

But while I sometimes perceive it, I have no idea whatsoever how to define or produce it.

Rick "quite sure that the response is not universal" Denney

[Lenny Eiger]

Depth is very important to me. It is the quality which interests me the most. There is a point where an image transcends what things look like and begins to communicate something more. It is often when someone "understands" something about what they are looking at. If this understanding is something I understand as well, there is a recognition that occurs. Even further, I may recognize that every human being also understands this, that its universal, and that makes me experience my own humanity, and my connection with the rest of life. I learn something.

I once went to a show of Lewis Hine's images, a retrospective with about 240 photographs. In every image, he did his best to draw out something about the person in front of him. He let them shine, the image was about them, and not particularly about him. The display of selflessness was overwhelming, perhaps made more so by the sheer number of images. I remember being very sorry that I did not have the opportunity to meet such a person. Arnold Newman's heavily graphic images seem to be about him, and while they might be impressive in some ways, they leave me cold by comparison. I love Robert Frank's work as well but it doesn't "do it" to me. Hine was special.

In the corner there was another room, with images from Hine's influences. I saw a photo called "Morning" by Clarence White. I was stunned. My jaw dropped and I think I stopped breathing for a while. Something about the image brought me right inside it. It was taken in 1910, printed in gravure, there was more atmosphere in an image than I had seen at the time. It moved my insides around. I felt like I was a changed person after seeing the image. I gained a new respect for what photography can do.

In my view, the "expression" in photography comes down to an expression of the relationship you have with what you are photographing. That's what we see in others' images, how one looks at the world. People come to their subjects with all sorts of emotions, from disdain to sweet love to awe, and everything in between. The feeling one starts out with is what shows in the image. Its what the rest see.

This is what the internal work is all about. The deeper one can connect with someone or something, the deeper the expression will be. That takes some work, mostly getting out of one's own way.

For this reason when I go out and photograph I get down on my knees and stick my hands in the dirt. I try and remember that I am part of this Earth, that I ought to have some gratitude, for a lot of things. I try and do my best to fully see what's in front of me, and try and understand something.

Lenny

[Heroique]

...C.S. Lewis’s counter-example [illustrating depth] was Malory's "the Moon shone clear" (from L'Mort de Arthur), the simplicity of which commands involvement from the reader, over and over again (and which hits my thrill button).

Interesting – Malory’s simple phrase has three heavy accents, slowing the pace.

I’ve often noticed my pace of viewing a “deep” photograph can slow down.

This reminds me, however, of Stephen Crane’s famous sentence, “The moon had been lighted and was hung in a treetop,” which communicates the clarity Malory wants to get across. Though also simple, it’s not slow at all – it gallops – yet it’s still deep and moving. (Crane’s use of a metaphor makes for another significant difference...)

Likewise, I think a “deep” photo can work on the viewer either slowly or quickly, depending on its arrangement.

[neil poulsen]

For me, photographs that approach deep are those about social commentary. Deep goes hand in hand with images that are thought-provoking.

The Steerage (Stieglitz) is an example. Or, some of Hines work that show child labor.

I have a friend who captured an image standing behind a row of police sitting on motorcycles who were watching a demonstration. That came across to me as deep, because I had this strong sense of three, not just two layers: the demonstration, the police, and the watchful photographer. It was really a neat photograph.

I'm not sure that "deep" is really photography's strongest suit. Inspiring, thought-provoking, humorous, revealing, beautiful, colorful, or informational, yes. But, not necessarily deep.