Do you have a style?

Pitxu said:
I think the best "styles" are the ones which happen on their own.
One day whilst browsing your contact sheets you might suddenly become aware that a style is developing. It might not even be the style you were chasing, a surprise!
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Dear Richard,

I'd completely agree, and go further: these 'self-generating' styles are the only ones worth bothering with.

Deliberately setting out to 'have a style' rather negates the idea of taking the best picture you can of a subject that interests you.

A personal style will develop fastest when you limit your equipment -- fart-arsing around with 10 different cameras and 20 different lenses is hardly conducive to a single style -- but you can also have different styles in different areas, e.g. a still-life style, a reportage style, an architecture style... Of course, many of the people with the most recognizable single 'style' shoot a limited range of subjects as well as using a limited range of equipment.

Finally, my own belief is that as a general rule, others should see your 'style' before you do. When they say, 'That's in your style', and you ask them what they mean, you should recognize what they say, and realize that it's what you do, even if you hadn't thought about it.

Cheers,

R.
 
People who know me have often been able to pick out my work in galleries, publications, family albums; but I do not claim to have a message or a vision.
 
I had about 10 decent pictures and I put them in a portfolio liked to show them around......and after a while I started copying myself partly because some people wanted to have their pics exactly like those I had shown them but for the larger part because

"......you might suddenly become aware that a style is developing. It might not even be the style you were chasing, a surprise!"

That's what I would think is it in a nutshell. In my opinion you can adopt a certain look but style is an achievement or rather a development.
When style gets a prison: I read that even Helmut Newton had a problem to get landscape photos he made in an exhibition even later as a book its still ahd to be combined with nudes.
 
Pitxu said:
Having a style can mostly be a handicap, limiting, a trap even.
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I can’t develop on the subject right now but I’ll quote a French novelist and a great Resistance fighter:
“L’artiste naît prisonnier du style, qui lui a permis de ne plus l'être du monde” said André Malraux (“The artist was born as a prisoner of his style, but his style freed him from the world”). Some prisoners are freer than most of those who think they are free without hard work. By the way, I agree with Ned about hard work.
I’ll quote another French writer, a great poet, Paul Valéry, who said: “Le style, pour l'écrivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision.” (“Style, for writers as well as for painters, is a matter of vision, not of technique”).
If it is true about painters, so it is about photographers.
Personally, I don’t know if I have a style (it’s too soon, since Ned rightly said it takes 10 years to develop one’s own style), but when I take pictures I can’t help shooting things always in the same way, always. I can’t do HCB, or Doisneau, or Winogrand … but I see things in the language of my own visual poetry, and shoot what I see, how I see it … whether it is bad or good.
Best,
Marc-A.
 
Yes. Blurry, grainy and of subjects not often thought of as photogenic. I often claim that a preference of uniqueness, rather than goodness.
 
Apparently I have a style. Whilst doing a magazine article, the guy from the magazine said "Ah, you're the one with the black and white train photographs". This then evolved from concentrating on just the lumps of steaming metal running on rails, to including the railway workers, eventually the railway workers ended up being the main subject.

Is this a "prison"? Not really, people tend to be... everywhere. If I'd have just stuck to the train photos, then it would be a prison.
 
For me a style develops from the things you like (even subconciously), about the work of others that you admire. It is pointless to emulate the things you dislike.... I rarely use colour and most photographs that excite me are mono, so I learned to dev and print mono (after a brief flirtation with colour transparencies). That was only the start of it though as I had to then learn how to print in a style that I liked as well. Decisions, decisions, all the while. This film or that ?? Which paper and developer ????? They all have an effect on style as percieved by the casual viewer and I guess, if I am honest with myself, I have a style that has been over 20 years in the making. My prints please me and that is important.
 
I have the opinion that in photography style develops more out of technical choices.

Take for instance how Picasso sketched - one way art buyers determine if they are buying an authentic Picasso sketch is by putting the pencil strokes from the drawing under a microscope - Picasso made decisive, unbroken lines when he sketched (because he was so damn good), whereas an imitator often stops midline to see if they are getting it right, and this is evident to an expert. But I digress - point is, the style of Picasso is obvious in something as fundemental as the way the pencil was moved across a sheet of paper.

In photography, we have a lot more technical "stuff" between us and the paper, such as film type, developer, agitation pattern, contrast preferences, paper selection, dilution of developer etc... it goes on. I think it is only natural that after doing photography for quite a while, most people settle on the "best" workflow for them - and the massive collection of choices is what could loosely constitutes someone's style. I'm not sure how one see's things through the lens or the subject matter they shoot determines style as much.
 
me.jpg


I have a style! I don't know if it shows in my photos though. It is, however, pretty tough taking photos while I'm holding my sleeping-bag cloak on.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Finally, my own belief is that as a general rule, others should see your 'style' before you do.
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Damn! I was about to say I wouldn't (and can't) have a style - unless someone tells me so. How else am I supposed to know?

For the rest of it (whatever that may be) I'll just keep taking photos that suit me.

...Mike
 
No style here either. Questionable morals too...

In time a style might emerge but there's no point in trying to force it.

By the way, I couldn't disagree more with what feenej posted.

Matthew
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
I have a style that people recognize when they see my work in galleries and exhibits. It comes from having worked on several very long term projects over a period of years (two of my projects have each taken over a decade and are still in progress). I think the reason many photographers never develop a style is that they are snappers, not artists with something to say. I've noticed over the years that photography as a hobby attracts people who own expensive cameras and never produce anything with them. There's also those who do take a lot of photos, many of them quite good, but they photograph in a disorganized way that reflects the fact that they are not interested in anything specific. Instead they constantly search for the 'pretty picture', and they might end up with many good images but as a whole their body of work does not show a as the life's work of an artist with a vision or a message.
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You certainly do have an arrogant style!
 
I'm positive that I have an inate style, although a lot of what I've shot over the years was art directed by somebody else and/or had to fit a particular space in a publication. The past year or so I've been going back through boxes of all the old stuff I have, boxes of negatives and contact sheets, prints, tear sheets, all the stuff we acumulate over the years. I's easy to compare the contact sheets from shoots in the early 1960's, when I first started out, with similar shoots made during all the years up to the present.

Both my personal work and my editorial photographs I think show a consistancy of style over the decades. I like to work in close, and I love shooting with ultra wide angle lenses. Some of my best work over the years was done with 19, 20, and 21mm lenses, and more recently I've been doing a lot of shooting with a 15mm lens. I love the effect of the forced perspective, and I have clients that love it also.
 
This thread made me realize that I have done my photography with the same mindset as I did my master's thesis. LOL. Old habits. Not a bad way to go, I guess.
 
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