Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Paradox
I attempted to explain my core approach to photography visually with the goat image but that may have been incomprehensible or seemed blithe. I went to the image after writing a treatise that was so long that no one would read it. So here it is in its simplest form. Straight photography has an uncanny simulacrum to visual reality but it is full of misleading information. (See Susan Sontang and the many tomes on the topic). This ambiguity and it's surreal implications are best demonstrated and explored in minimally post processed images. The heavily post processed images currently popular risk obscuring the ambiguity and uncertainty by making it plain to the viewer that the image is "photoshopped" and thus (apparently) more a product of the photographers imagination than of visual reality.
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Jon: Isn't the photographer"s imagination often the main point of post-processing?
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ReplyDeleteWhat I am trying to get to is the tension between the straight shot's apparent literal representation of reality and the fact that a straight shot is never a literal representation of reality. Other folks want to deal with the plasticity afforded by modern post processing. Neither is superior they are just different ways of approaching images. The photographers imagination is dominant in both but the imagination is less directly evident in the straight shot. This fools a lot of people who identify highly post processed images as "creative" and who identify straight shots as "reporting".
ReplyDeleteJon: It seems to me that there are some 'big time' semantic issues here. For example, what is "a literal representation of reality"?
ReplyDeleteIndeed, that is how books get written on the topic. As far as a literal representation of reality, the image on a negative or sensor is formed by the light that touched the object, a fairly literal form of representation. While philosophers can work on this issue for quite a while it probably better for photographers to practice their craft as they see fit regardless of the ultimate resolution achieved or not achieved by the philosophers.
ReplyDeleteThere is an infinity of fun to be had trying to deal with the vast differences between a photograph produced by an optical system of some kind and the perception produced by the brain/eye apparatus. Since the brain and eye are alive there are immense differences right out of the gate. My preference is to have a crude preverbal awareness of this problem and flail around with it instead of attempting to elucidate it properly as that would involve a second career.
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