Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/04/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I hate to be so wordy lately, but I have to weigh in on the issue of "What is a good picture"? We've had a few people repeat a few worn canards, such as "It's a good picture if it has impact" (demonstrably untrue when you consider that most advertising photography is specifically calculated to have impact, yet most of it is relentlessly superficial and doesn't last--if you doubt this, go through ten magazines from ten years ago and find me two advertising photographs that you could put on a museum or gallery wall with the implication that they were "good" pictures and not be laughed out of the building); "It's only good if you like it" (emphatically untrue; most people consider photographs to be just another species of decorative pictures, without realizing what makes photographs unique and different, and most people have execrable taste in pictures anyway--generally, 95% of the population wouldn't know a really good photograph if it were an alligator and bit them on the ass); and so forth. If you want to know what a good photograph is you've either got to feel it or learn it. To _feel_ it, you need to trust yourself and your reactions, and give yourself permission to let photographs have personal meaning for you. You won't know you're there until you're as sanguine as a Buddha about liking pictures that nobody else does. The common wisdom about pictures is surprisingly close to true about "good" pictures too--like snapshots in an album, they connect us to our past and they connect us to the world and they connect us to our experiences. If you have photographs that have whole worlds of meaning to you, but to others they're just photographs--say,of an old woman (your dear departed mother) a room (the apartment you brought your bride home to live in, twenty or thirty or forty years ago) some trees (the place you spent the best vacation you ever had with the best friends you ever had), these can be "good photographs" because you only have one life, and these are flashes of light from your own past. They commemorate and record meaning. Take this ability one step further and you'll find yourself able to like photographs that commemorate and record aesthetic experiences you have with the photograph. With most photographs I've really loved in my life, I can tell you _when_ I really loved them; the same is true for photographers; I can tell you when I went through my Caponigro period and when I discovered whom and who I like best now. If you think this is static and never changes, either you're stuck, or you're not paying attention. Some people only ever listen to Beethoven, and never grow another cubit; some people can only approve of Ansel Adams, and never explore beyond those bounds. Bah. I could go on...at length. (You have been warned! <g>) To _learn_ it, you need to learn how photographs function and what others think. This is the aesthete/scholar road to wisdom that so many empiricists (including my dear friend Phil Davis) rail against. But art is oligarchic, like it or not--there is an elite subset of humanity that loves and understands it better than the common man. _De gustibus non est disputandum_* is true, but anyone who _has_ it knows that taste evolves and responds to being informed. The folks here who have been inveighing against public sculpture don't understand that sculpture. I'm not saying they have to _like_ anything--no one is more passionate than an aesthete about what they cannot abide--but people who have learned about art understand it; even what they hate, they understand. Bewilderment is just not a useful mode of approach. There is only a small historical/philosophical/critical tradition where photography is concerned, but the best of it is rich. I could recommend ten books that could keep anyone occupied for ten years. Most of all, to learn, you need to practice delectation. We photographers do this all the time with our own photographs, because we edit the "good" ones from the bad, or think we do, or make some halfhearted intermittent stabs at doing so. I won't get into the fact that many photographers, especially amateur photographers, are wretched and inconstant editors and often feel at sea as to which of their own pictures are "best." If that's the case for you, here's an exercise: hire an outside editor. Have a photographer friend or someone else come in and go over your archive and pick out a portfolio. Chances are you won't agree with them, but I'll bet you learn something about your own work. A few more exercises: when you go to a museum, try Tom Hoving's trick--every room you go into, pick out the picture or art object in the room you like best in three minutes or less. When you go to photography shows, pick the three pictures you like best and the three pictures you like least. Go through a book of stock photography and see if you can find three pictures you've never seen before. You can literally practice delectation _every day_, like you brush your teeth or read the news. Find one good picture in your morning newspaper. Do you use a bulletin board? This is the most critical tool in all of photography, in my opinion. When you get back from a period of shooting with a mass of raw work, make workprints of everything that interests you--in batches if need be--and pin them all up in a place where you look at them often--by the telephone, or on the wall in front of your desk. What you will find is that you can pin up twenty pictures that are all more or less equal to you--you might think they are all just about as "good" as each other. Four days later, as if by magic, two or three of them will seem clearly superior to the rest, four or five will be borderline for you, and the rest will have fallen away. Take the good ones and the bad ones down. Print the good ones; throw the bad ones in a box and never look at them again. But STUDY THE BORDERLINE ONES--leave them up for a few more days--these are the pictures you'll learn the most from! They represent the "frontier" of your taste and your concerns. Don't print them, but listen to them. Man, I oughta teach a course or somthing...I could go on about this subject the whole darned day. Sorry to soak up so much bandwidth...(but you probably realize I've only touched lightly on these subjects). And please, PLEASE don't quote this whole message back to me if you choose to comment!! - --Mike Copyright 1998 by Michael C. Johnston * "Taste is indisputable," the anthem cry of the middlebrow.