Blake remarked a little while back that it is rare to read negative criticism online, and my observations tend to agree. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered this. They’re talking about me! And it’s wonderfully negative.
I decided that it would be fun to cut and paste the feedback here and offer a point-by-point response. After all, there’s some genuine food for thought in there and you usually have to pay someone for an honest opinion these days.
From the I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night and [PHOTO] Every Day – Artist’s Corner thread in the Penny Arcade Forums, page 46, retrieved on October 19, 2009:
erisian pope: Can a snapshot be beautiful? Sure! Can it be art? Of course! Can I even identify the differences in some examples that work for me versus those that don’t? Nope! (William Eggleston is a constant enigma to me, some of his work totally speaks to me, some doesn’t; more recently I have a confused relationship with Dalton Rooney).
Eggleston is an enigma to me, too. I think he’s probably an enigma to most people, which is part of the reason he’s so interesting. I find that I don’t like more of his work than I do like, but the ones I do like, I really, really like. And I, too, have a confused relationship with Dalton Rooney.
erisian pope:So what do you think about William Eggleston’s work? How about Dalton Rooney’s work? (Eggleston is commonly accepted as a great photographer, Rooney is contemporary and not widely recognized that I know of, but has some attention)
I am bewildered by a trend I see among contemporary photographers towards kitschiness, americana, documentaries of suburbia, and other ways that the mundane and often ugly gets showcased. Eggleston may be the inspiration for this trend, but regardless of its roots I find little appeal in it. (Lauren Greenfield mostly fits in this category in my mind). But can the trend be utterly devoid of merit and still have traction? I guess so.
You kind of lost me on a lot of this one. I feel like you’re trying to associate me with Eggleston somehow, which doesn’t really make sense to me. You are correct, however, when you say that I am not widely recognized. Are you sure you’re not thinking of someone else?
CommunistCow: I like maybe 1 out of every 20 or 30 photos from Eggleston and I don’t like anything from Dalton. Then again I judge older photos a bit differently than I do newer photos. The same way I judge older movies slightly differently than new ones because of the differing equipment, processing, and style of the time.
CommunistCow does make a good point, though. My new plan is to just stick everything in a shoebox and wait 40 years until I’m dead. Hopefully whoever finds it will know what to do with it.
erisian pope:So if you don’t like Rooney (and neither do I, frankly) do you have thoughts on why his and other similar mundane works are getting attention? Have you seen this trend that I’ve seen?
What is this attention you keep going on about? I’m almost positive you’ve got the wrong guy.
erisian pope: I asked my wife the same question and her take on Rooney’s work (the one example I coerced her into viewing) was that his work is extremely literal. He photos exactly what is there as opposed to people (like me) who look for the perfect subject or the perfect moment or people (like you) who create the perfect light, etc. His work is all about what is immediately there. I think she or I even used the term “unflinching eye.”
I think us seeing candor in his work and you seeing “bucking convention” probably are two pieces that combine in his work. I think you’re right about them going against the grain.
I just don’t understand who the audience is. Art focused on aesthetics makes sense to me. Art focused elsewhere always eludes me (with journalism as a slight one-off. but good journalism still has an eye towards aesthetics).
OK, now we’ve got a little something to work with. Even though I am writing this tongue-in-cheek, I am genuinely touched that someone has spent enough time looking at my work to form a real opinion, good or bad.
“His work is extremely literal”
This is true in the sense that I don’t manipulate or distort what I see with goofy angles or camera tricks. I do like to think that my photographs are open to interpretation, though. If I were to try to describe my style to someone, I would probably say that I try not to get in the way too much.
“He photos exactly what is there as opposed to people (like me) who look for the perfect subject or the perfect moment or people (like you) who create the perfect light, etc. His work is all about what is immediately there.”
Completely true, and I’m surprised to hear this used in a negative way. When I first became interested in photography, I was attracted to novelty: alt-processing, low angles, wide angles, perfect lighting, perfect moment. Until I realized just how completely boring and shallow all of that is. Anyone can learn how to operate a camera and decently light a subject, the rule of thirds isn’t any big secret, and anybody can wait ten days for the perfect sunrise over the Grand Canyon or whatever it is.
What’s the point in doing something that anyone else can do? If someone else might as well take the picture, then let them take it! Or, even better, go buy a postcard, it will probably be much better than any picture you or I can take.
“I think she or I even used the term ‘unflinching eye.’”
Again I can’t figure out how this could possibly be considered a negative thing, even though I think some of my work veers towards the romantic I suppose it’s all a matter of degree, and I’m going to choose to take this as a compliment, too.
“I think us seeing candor in his work and you seeing ‘bucking convention’ probably are two pieces that combine in his work. I think you’re right about them going against the grain.”
If by “going against the grain” you’re talking about the guys taking pictures of the Grand Canyon, then yes, they’re a bunch of idiots. But as a general rule I try not to think too much about what other people are doing when I’m taking pictures, because it really messes with my head.
I just don’t understand who the audience is.
a) Obviously. b) There is no audience. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. You’ve got the wrong guy.
Dalton who?
Exactly.
I think these threaded comments show that you have in fact found an audience. It may not be an especially supportive group but in your own words "someone has spent enough time looking at my work to form a real opinion, good or bad." That's further than most of us get.
You know, Blake, I guess you're right. I've found my audience, and they hate me!
I think they are wrong photographer …
Otherwise, we must bear in mind that the picture is totally subjective and not everyone has the same tastes, nor the same interpretations or opinions.
I'm just kind of shocked that there's semi-informed photography criticism on the Penny Arcade forums.
I'm with you on some of this, but I'm not so sure that a valid defense of — I'm not sure what, exactly; deadpan? mundane subjects? the lack of manipulation? — is "anyone can make a pretty picture". First of all, I think we should judge art for what it is, rather than what it took to make it. I.e., even if it's easy to do, if it's good, it's good. Second, well, maybe the Grand Canyon in sunrise or whatever is kind of an obvious subject, even if I don't agree that anyone could do it well, it's absolutely not the case that "perfect lighting, perfect moment" is easy to do. Very few can do it. I'm inclined to think those who say it's easy either have terrible taste (since they are convinced that many passable shots are "perfect lighting, perfect moment") or that they've never picked up a camera themselves.
That said, there's really no need for a defense. The pictures speak for themselves. Some of your pictures I really like, some of them I don't like. Neither I nor anyone else will like them any more or less because there's some kind of transcendent justification for taking photographs that way.
Now, I'm off to make some photos.
Simen:
When I said that anyone can take a beautiful picture of a beautiful place, I didn't mean to say that it is easy, it's just that it's so painfully obvious. That's not to say that I don't think that there's value in that kind of work, just that it's not the sort of thing that I get any satisfaction from doing.
When I first became interested in photography (and this was not very long ago at all), my very first instinct was to seek out those perfect moments. I think it's completely natural to want to make these kinds of simple, beautiful photographs! But for me, it quickly became an automatic process. "Where am I going to find the most dramatic angle and the perfect light and the perfect subject?" I became an expert at producing images like this, which, regardless of what I think now, were pretty exciting for me at the time.
There was a lot work involved: continually honing my technical skills, my sense of composition, a lot of exploration and patience. But these are not the things about photography that have kept me interested in making photographs. To me they're just part of the process.
As I have become a more and more sophisticated viewer of images, my tastes have become very fine-tuned. What I find beautiful is no longer what most people find beautiful, and I'm OK with that. Unfortunately for me, it means that most photographs I see these days let me down. That's why it's such a joy to discover something new that speaks to me, because it doesn't happen very often.
In great work there is a kind of transcendence of the subject, where what you are seeing is not just a representation of a collection of objects, but the vision of the artist put down on paper. Weston's Pepper, for example, is not a pepper. It's not even a picture of a pepper. It is something that existed solely in his own mind, and then he made it real. He just used a pepper to make it real.
I'm not saying that this kind of transcendence is impossible when working with a beautiful subject, but it's easy to allow beauty to substitute for vision, which in my mind constitutes a failure. And that was my problem: I was working with beautiful subjects and letting them do the work for me. So maybe what I'm doing now is a kind of rigorous formal training. I'm learning to take photographs of what is actually there rather than a collection of symbols. And hoping, for just a fraction of a second, to find that transcendent moment.
Dalton ! We love you !
ps: I might be in Brooklyn around November 13-16. Could I get your autograph?
My autograph? I should be asking for yours! Yeah, definitely let me know when you're in town.
Then I must have misunderstood what you were trying to say. When I think of "a perfect photographic moment", I think of an ideal coming-together of all its elements. "Perfect" photographs, photographs of sunsets and piers composed after the rule of thirds and so on, aren't perfect moments, because they're stale. They have no sense of reality, lived life, nothing to excite or surprise you, nothing to upset your expectations, nothing that tells you anything you didn't already know. On the other hand, perfect moments, which (for me) could be HCB-style "decisive" moments or simply the sun at the position in the sky that makes the shadow of a light pole fall a certain way on a wall, or whatever, are those that contain both a tension that make them interesting and some kind of harmony that ties everything together anyway. In other words, you were using "perfect" to mean "textbook", while I interpreted it as something else entirely, some kind of dull attitude that says we shouldn't look for those great visual pleasures, we should just point the lens at mundane stuff and let them speak for themselves. I should have caught on since I don't see that tendency in your pictures.
I'm kind of hazy on the distinction you're making between photos that transcend the subject and ones that don't. Could you elaborate?
But aren't the guys photographing the Grand Canyon doing that too? It's just that the subject matter is so thoroughly familiar and conventionalized that we can't help but impose this standard collection of symbols on it. I see "taking photographs of what is actually there" as a question of authenticity (wacky processing, HDR, photoshop, or plain old representing what was there fairly accurately and without significant modifications), not as a question of novelty or originality. The scenic landscapers aren't fabricating reality, they're just recording a slice of it that's been photographed too many times before in the same old ways it's been photographed a thousand times. Their sins may include being lazy, unoriginal, boring, excessively rule-bound, uncreative, tied to convention and facilitating the easy fallback to symbols rather than actually engaging with a picture, but I can't see how they're not photographing what's actually there.
Sorry, Simen, I could have been more clear. I probably should have used quotes when I said "perfect", because I was referring to the original use of the word in erisian pope's comment. Textbook is a good way to describe it; because I think he is looking for something from the pages of Popular Photography.
I'm glad we got that cleared up, because my own work certainly does involve my own search for perfect moments. It's just that the moments that capture my attention aren't always the same as the ones that capture others' attention. It irked me that the commentor said "Art focused on aesthetics makes sense to me. Art focused elsewhere always eludes me" implying that aesthetics don't play a part in my work. I think the word his is looking for is "pretty".
When I use the word "transcendence" and say "taking photographs of what is actually there", I am talking about two aspects of the same phenomenon. And I do not think that the average photographer making beautiful pictures in national parks is aware of this process or capturing it in any way. It's very hard for me to put this in writing; it's one of those "I know it when you see it" situations, but I will try.
The element I am trying to describe is an almost mystical talent some photographers have to create photographs that go beyond a simple representation of reality, but do it with perception alone, without any visual exaggeration or extreme manipulations of the process. They just see things differently than most people.
One aspect of this is simply being incredibly perceptive and sensitive to the subject, and being intimately familiar with the process of transforming a three-dimensional space into two-dimensions. There is definitely a technical component of all this too, knowing your equipment well and understanding exactly what's going to happen when you trip the shutter.
The other component (in my theory, anyway) is being able to completely separate the process of recognition from the process of composition. When most people take a picture of a tree, there is a mental model of a tree in their head that stands in for the tree that they are photographing, and that model gets in the way of seeing the picture clearly. In some metaphorical way, they're taking a picture of what's in their head rather than what's actually there. That's why we're all surprised when pictures don't look anything like we expect. It's partly a problem of not paying enough attention, but I think that it's also a problem of allowing our preconceived notions of what to expect to get in the way of "what's actually there".
In order to see things clearly, you've got to be able to juggle a mental model of the image you're putting together (which is probably representational) while simultaneously deconstructing everything down to the structural & sensual level and eliminating recognition. When all of that is reassembled, the final image is two things simultaneously: an incredibly precise record of exactly what happened at the time, and a perfect representation of what was going on in the photographer's head at that same moment.
That brings me back to Weston's Pepper. When I said earlier that it's not a photograph of a pepper, I wasn't speaking literally of course. But what must have gone on in Weston's head, I feel certain, is a process where the pepper ceased being a pepper, and became nothing more than geometry and light and shade in two dimensions. Only after everything was reconstructed on paper and we as viewers have that moment of recognition does it become a pepper again, only this time our expectations have been completely turned around on us. Weston's photograph has transcended the original subject.
I know my description is very imprecise and I know I'm verging into the realm of mysticism and metaphors. I am feeling a bit frustrated with my abilities to make a coherent case for something that seems to make sense in my head, but I think I have gotten at least a little closer to explaining myself.