Is modern photography lacking soul?

[emraphoto]

Donald Weber

Noah Addis

Eugene Richards

Brent Foster

Ikuru Kuwajima

Erica Mcdonald

Yoav Galai

Q. Sakamaki

I don't buy it that there's no soul. Are you really looking?

 

[emraphoto]

Photography has never been healthier, the aesthetic value of any picture is relative to your tastes.

The proliferation of the medium has allowed many more people to publish their work for a worldwide audience; 10 years ago it would of been impossible.

I also think the Magnum portfolio is stronger than ever with the addition of photographers such as D'Agata etc.

Agreed! Addario, Pelegrin, Anderson and the list goes on

 

[peterm1]

Sorry, no offence to anyone but I must admit I am getting tired of this almost constant stream of film = good : digital = bad threads (or at least threads with that implication) that seem to permeate this forum recently. Its really getting very boring and seems like nothing so much as old guy cynicism (.....OK I was going to say old f*rt) and makes the forum members seem like a bunch of luddites. Every day there is a new post traversing the same tired old ground.

Weren't the old blokes saying the same in the 1920's when Leica and Contax introduced their radical 35mm format and these gained ground over the old plate cameras. Picture this........."These new so called photographers are nothing so much as happy snappers. All the time shooting without a thought - no consideration is given to proper blah blah blah. You are not a photographer unless you carry around a 20 pound camera plus glass plates that take 10 seconds for each exposure. Then you will really have to stop and think about what you are doing blah blah blah."

Perhaps the correct way to characterize such threads is to say

"Ahhhhh, they sure dont make nostalgia like they used to!"

Here is my two cents worth------------Both film and digital are good. Full stop.

Sorry if I sound cranky. I have not had my coffee yet. And besides, perhaps the truth is that if others are cynical old f*rts, I am a cranky old f*rt.

 

[_mark__]

In addition I would add; that rather than lacking soul a large proportion of contemporary photography lacks bravery, whether it is the bravery to confront a difficult subject matter or the bravery to remain true to your own visual style. It is often much easier to shy away from it or conform to the opinion of others. Great work most often comes from taking risks and being honest.

 

[x-ray]

I think Gabor got it right. The fact that we are bombarded by hundreds of bad pictures dilutes the overall effect of photography on the public consciousness. In effect, one sees so many pictures that one's 'eyes glaze over'.

I couldn't agree more. I also believe nostalgia plays a part too but I also believe the many images have become so processed in photoshop that they've become very cold and sterile. Part of the beauty of the better work from the past was the technical imperfections like grain and the "film look". Photoshop / digital has created unrealistic images that are simply too perfect. Lenses are too good and even film is near the point of too perfect but at least we can still make images using old style emulsions (efke / adox /foma etc.) with vintage lenses and developer formulas from the past. to me scanning the neg direct kills some of that look and printing wet on fine SG paper retains much more of it.

 

[Rick Waldroup]

"It's a sad fact that most digital 'shooters' don't care about composition, don't evaluate a scene, don't interact with the object. Most of them just keep firing away while passing a scene."

This is complete and utter nonsense.

I shot film for over 30 years. I shoot only digital now. I have changed very little in the way I compose a shot, or in the way I shoot.

If anything, shooting with digital cameras has opened up new vistas and new territories to discover. It's a brave new world and I want to embrace it, not run from it and pine for yesteryear. A digital camera is just another tool to capture an image, nothing more and nothing less.

 

[emraphoto]

In addition I would add; that rather than lacking soul a large proportion of contemporary photography lacks bravery, whether it is the bravery to confront a difficult subject matter or the bravery to remain true to your own visual style. It is often much easier to shy away from it or conform to the opinion of others. Great work most often comes from taking risks and being honest.

i ask again, have you really looked?

 

[emraphoto]

how did you arrive at the "most" part? was there a study done? is there information available supporting this?

 

[JoeV]

Cameras don't create images, photographers do. So, if there is anything valid to the argument that the quality of photography has gone downhill, it's the fault of the person(s) pushing the button, not the gear (and I'm not even certain that argument is valid; perhaps it's just the immediate access to countless images of lackluster quality).

With the tools we have available today -- the best of analog and digital technology -- we live in a unique time in history when there is zero excuse for not enjoying a revolution in great photography. Twenty years from now there may be no more film to put in our film cameras, at which point they will become relics, museum pieces. But for now, we can enjoy, and exploit, both.

If anything, there is a lack of creative vision and merciless, critical editing. We're inundated with cr*p, not because of digital camera and post-capture technology, but because of the immediate access to the world of media, both as suppliers and consumers of imagery. Anybody can post anything online, regardless of quality or merit or artistic vision; I'm guilt of that, I'm certain.

~Joe

 

[gho]

To put it short: I think photography today is up and well. It is true, we are flooded with images, but this does not mean, that photographic activitiy as a whole has become soulless. I am sure there are a lot of creative people out there, taking great, 'soulful' photographs, be it on film, digital or whatever.

Maybe you are just looking at the wrong place? What is the soul of photography?

 

[Bob Michaels]

<snip> A digital camera is just another tool to capture an image, nothing more and nothing less.

Sometimes one sentence summarizes the best response to some old tired arguments. I might delete "digital" as a qualifying adverb and allow the phrase to apply to all cameras.

 

[pakeha]

Sometimes one sentence summarizes the best response to some old tired arguments. I might delete "digital" as a qualifying adverb and allow the phrase to apply to all cameras.

seconded,
` so much style without substance and so much stuff without style, hard to recognise the real thing that comes along once and a while' *

translated, there is so much more around these days, but there is , if you look some soul and style still about.

* not mine, from some song i remember, probably 80`s rock

 

[aizan]

make haste to the bookshop!

 

[back alley]

there's a lot bad smell in this thread...

 

[charjohncarter]

Dear Ray,

I think a lot of the impact of older pictures is a form of nostalgia -- "Yes! It was just like that!" -- plus the fact that we have 150+ years of pics to look at: the bad has fallen by the wayside. Look at AP from 50 and 100 years ago and the majority of the photography was worse than today.

I'm currently re-reading 20th Century Photography, Museum Ludwig Cologne and there's an awful lot of indifferent mono in it as well as a great deal of brilliant stuff.

As for the M7, my own view is that buying the right camera should spur you to improve your photography, becase if it doesn't, you're a fool to buy it. Then again, there are plenty here who don't appear to understand the concept of the right camera: they just buy cameras because they can.

Oh: and Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to you too (and to all others).

Cheers,

R.

Merry Christmas, Roger, I have gone through some of my loser images from way back and all of a sudden the don't look that bad, (maybe not that good either). This is from my low quality camera period, which I have gone through many times, and am going through again, (this one is a 104 Instamatic about 1964-5 with Ektachrome):

 

[robklurfield]

Here's a scan from a contact sheet from a roll I shot in about 1984. It has a lot of soul. Wait, no. That's not soul. That's mold growing on the contact sheet because it was stored in a flooded basement. Soul, that's something different. I don't have a horse in the race. You can all pick up where you left off.

 

[bmattock]

It's a sad fact that most digital 'shooters' don't care about composition, don't evaluate a scene, don't interact with the object. Most of them just keep firing away while passing a scene.

It's not a fact.

I know a few photographers who use modern cameras and return from a shooting day with just 15 images — not 600. These are different, these are definitely not mainstream.

You know nothing. Absolutely nothing.

 

[raid]

Today, as we were driving along the beach, my oldest daughter asked: "who was the first woman ever on Earth?" I thought ... maybe Eve? My youngest daughter had this response: "It was Lady Gaga!"

I thought %$#@!

 

[amateriat]

Soul is hard to define, almost impossible to nail down, and too damned easy to argue about (as we have demonstrated). A camera, like a musical instrument, can help facilitate the creation of a work that some or many of us might agree has "soul", but it can't embody it. So a Leica M7 is more or less on the same plane in this regard as, say, an M9. (I don't claim that big-ass dSLRs, for example, necessarily deny soul; I just think they suck for a lot of other reasons, starting with their sheer size. 😉)

Yes, there's the issue of TV and the Web; there are also all those camera-phones and Flips and games and apps and all this motion that keeps us glues to all kinds of screens, big and small, which scatters our attention and reduces our perceived time to pay rapt attention to one thing... a sonata, a painting, a sense of time flowing past without our hurtling through it with grim determination.

(Okay, I should lay off the Rilke late at night, but you might get my point.)

Soul takes a little time, even if the image you just took, so full of same, took a fraction of a second. It's the thought behind the picture, conscious or otherwise, deep or fleeting, that really makes the difference. Soul doesn't require Big Thoughts, at least not all the time. But thought does count. So does feeling. And the two need not be diametrically opposed.

I much prefer the boxes I put film into. Leave me stranded with something digital*, however, and I'd cope.


- Barrett

(*But please, please, please, don't leave me alone with a EOS-1D anything. They make my teeth itch.)

 

[Ezzie]

.........

And kids today have no respect for their elders.

......

So said Socrates, some years ago 😉 It would seem we've been on a downward spiral for quite som time