Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
As a proud and suitably verminous member of that scurvy bunch, I can only point out that all are free to choose their own position and are welcome to stick to it.
So, a cheerful Yo-ho-ho to you all 😀
Photography theory
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As a proud and suitably verminous member of that scurvy bunch, I can only point out that all are free to choose their own position and are welcome to stick to it.
So, a cheerful Yo-ho-ho to you all 😀
Jamie123
Veteran
Yes, that's what I said.
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
I hereby award you the Sejanus Gold Award for the cleverest Freudean slip of 2014! 😀
Michael Markey
Veteran
RichC
Well-known
Good grief!
It's fine not being interested in photographic theory - nothing wrong with just wanting to take photographs.
But only fools laud ignorance. Knowledge will not make you a worse photographer - it's more likely you'll be a better one.
And of course you can teach art: art doesn't happen in a vacuum. Art is a product of culture - it doesn't arise spontaneously. A few gifted individuals may naturally pick up cues (or simply be lucky), so their art resonates with people, but most artists make better work if they study how and why art functions. It's no different to being an engineer: some people are mechanically gifted, but to be an effective engineer you need to understand your field.
Going back to photography, surely understanding theories that discuss fundamental differences between photographs and paintings such as their relationship with time and truth cannot help but be useful, even if it has no impact on how you personally take photographs? And take art history: if you live in the West, how we look at, interpret and take photographs is highly influenced by our culture, by centuries of European art - if you compare, say, studio photographic portraits taken in the UK with those from India, you'll notice a Moghul influence in the latter (e.g. they can seem too two-dimensional for our taste). And Japanese photography differs significantly in style from Western photography, taken as a whole - surely knowing why is useful?
It's fine not being interested in photographic theory - nothing wrong with just wanting to take photographs.
But only fools laud ignorance. Knowledge will not make you a worse photographer - it's more likely you'll be a better one.
And of course you can teach art: art doesn't happen in a vacuum. Art is a product of culture - it doesn't arise spontaneously. A few gifted individuals may naturally pick up cues (or simply be lucky), so their art resonates with people, but most artists make better work if they study how and why art functions. It's no different to being an engineer: some people are mechanically gifted, but to be an effective engineer you need to understand your field.
Going back to photography, surely understanding theories that discuss fundamental differences between photographs and paintings such as their relationship with time and truth cannot help but be useful, even if it has no impact on how you personally take photographs? And take art history: if you live in the West, how we look at, interpret and take photographs is highly influenced by our culture, by centuries of European art - if you compare, say, studio photographic portraits taken in the UK with those from India, you'll notice a Moghul influence in the latter (e.g. they can seem too two-dimensional for our taste). And Japanese photography differs significantly in style from Western photography, taken as a whole - surely knowing why is useful?
Sparrow
Veteran
... how do offer my opinion then? ... I think even Rich would admit I'm more in the knows-about-art-and-knows-what-I-like crew ... I observed that Kenneth Clarks Civilisation was far more valuable than wasting time reading On Photography is that philistinism or critique?
Michael Markey
Veteran
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
Terry Pratchett sums this up beautifully, as some beings try to work out what makes a "great work of art"...
stephen.w
Established
Sontag and Barthes pseudo-philosophers? Could you give us a specific examples of arguments which you consider to be susceptible to this criticism?
Are Camera Lucida and On Photography books which will help one take better pictures? Of course not. They are books about the mercurial, and at times morally ambiguous, medium that most here have dedicated a significant portion of their lives.
As for developing one's own "art theory", you are right that one is better off looking at the pictures. But that is not what those (or similar, lesser) books are about.
RichC
Well-known
Nothing wrong with theorists. The head of the MA Photography degree course at Brighton University where I studied isn't a photographer - she just writes about photography! Yet, she is highly respected - even by photographers, such as the Magnum photographer Mark Power who also lectures there... If you read her articles, they're clear, lucid and to the point.
It seems a bit strange to say that those who don't practise something shouldn't be taken as seriously as those who do practise! I really fail to see why being unable or unwilling to do some activity makes a person unable to have a useful opinion on it!
However, I'm fully in accord with your last point - though that should apply to life in general, not just art! Everyone should be sceptical about everything! Those who take something as a truism simply because it's from an eminent person, or commonly encountered or widely believed - but who don't consider its validity - are fools!
And some art schools are better than others. I came to my MA Photography degree with no formal academic arts background - I was accepted simply on the basis of my portfolio and my BSc (the latter proof that I could write academic essays - albeit about science!), and I was generally a pain in the butt, approaching art theory with a scientific, empirical rigour, always questioning and countering that which I found lacking. Despite my contrary attitude and challenge to "the orthodoxy", I passed with Distinction!
And of course some art criticism is hot air! But that doesn't make it all garbage! A painting or photograph is no different to anything else we humans create - and can be dismantled by those with learning to understand aspects of how and why they were created, and our interaction with it - whilst being aware of its subjectivity.
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
Now, that is something with which I agree fully.
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Not all "intellectuals" are created equal. Consider, for example, Umberto Eco. If you like that sort of thing (and I do) his Travels in Hyperreality is a delight; but here we are dealing with a genuinely original thinker, a witty writer, and a man who delights in popular culture as well as "high culture". A single essay in that book is worth more than everything Sontag ever wrote. She and Barthes are so painfully aware of themselves as "intellectuals" that they disappear up their own bums. If you like French intellectuals, dear old Sartre was much more fun than Barthes, though I can't say the same for Simone de Beauvoir.
Perhaps I should make my attitude clearer. I am all in favour of art theory. It can be fascinating. But it needs to be well thought out and well written. Even when it's chewy and hard work in places, such as Gombrich's Art and Illusion, it can still be well worth reading. But I have rarely read anything specifically on photography that was one tenth as good Eco or Gombrich -- or as good as Richard Gregory's Eye and Brain.
Kozloff's Photography and Fascination is certainly among the best, but then, he deals with real photographs, real situations, not the vapid and etiolated generalizations of a Barthes or Sontag. This is in marked contrast to most books on the "philosophy of photography", which remind me of Dorothy Parker's "This is not a book to be cast aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force."
In other words, do not imagine that my disdain for the maunderings of third-rate pseudo-intellectuals is a symptom of anti-intellectualism. Take it, rather, as an admiration for true intellectualism. It is disdain born of decades of readings on the subject, as opposed to the reverence extended to Sontag and the like by mostly young students who have read very little else on the subject and take Sontag at her own valuation, or at the valuation of those of their tutors who recommended her.
Finally, I am utterly convinced that the vast majority of whatever I have learned about photography has come from going to hundreds, probably thousands, of exhibitions, and from looking more or less critically at pictures (not just photographs), whether at exhibitions, in books and magazines, on billboards, or even on packaging. As I say above, art theory can be fascinating; but just as camera collecting and taking pictures are only tangentially related, so are art theory and art. Arguably the best book on art theory is Bayles and Orland's Art and Fear, which basically says, "Artists all get scared but the only way through the fear is to go on making art." It is not prescriptive about what that art is, or how to make it, or how anyone else makes/made it; but it is admirably descriptive.
Cheers,
R.
Perhaps I should make my attitude clearer. I am all in favour of art theory. It can be fascinating. But it needs to be well thought out and well written. Even when it's chewy and hard work in places, such as Gombrich's Art and Illusion, it can still be well worth reading. But I have rarely read anything specifically on photography that was one tenth as good Eco or Gombrich -- or as good as Richard Gregory's Eye and Brain.
Kozloff's Photography and Fascination is certainly among the best, but then, he deals with real photographs, real situations, not the vapid and etiolated generalizations of a Barthes or Sontag. This is in marked contrast to most books on the "philosophy of photography", which remind me of Dorothy Parker's "This is not a book to be cast aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force."
In other words, do not imagine that my disdain for the maunderings of third-rate pseudo-intellectuals is a symptom of anti-intellectualism. Take it, rather, as an admiration for true intellectualism. It is disdain born of decades of readings on the subject, as opposed to the reverence extended to Sontag and the like by mostly young students who have read very little else on the subject and take Sontag at her own valuation, or at the valuation of those of their tutors who recommended her.
Finally, I am utterly convinced that the vast majority of whatever I have learned about photography has come from going to hundreds, probably thousands, of exhibitions, and from looking more or less critically at pictures (not just photographs), whether at exhibitions, in books and magazines, on billboards, or even on packaging. As I say above, art theory can be fascinating; but just as camera collecting and taking pictures are only tangentially related, so are art theory and art. Arguably the best book on art theory is Bayles and Orland's Art and Fear, which basically says, "Artists all get scared but the only way through the fear is to go on making art." It is not prescriptive about what that art is, or how to make it, or how anyone else makes/made it; but it is admirably descriptive.
Cheers,
R.
Sparrow
Veteran
... yes but the fact remains that Sontag's essays are written in such a manner that they're the opposite of 'clear, lucid and to the point.'
In fact Nostradamus would be stumped by its obscurity in parts
In fact Nostradamus would be stumped by its obscurity in parts
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Alas, no, because I have long ago given away both books. Not that I would put myself to the torture of trying to read them again even if I hadn't.
Difficult ideas can be difficult to explain, but first, this assumes that the difficult ideas are worthwhile in the first place -- which Barthes and Sontag signally failed to demonstrate -- and second, it does not preclude the possibility of writing clearly and interestingly about difficult ideas: a challenge that Eco meets brilliantly, but Barthes and Sontag never came near. Even Marx's Capital is easier to read than either; more profound; wittier; and has more to offer the realms of art theory.
Cheers,
R.
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
I have a theory that, the less real information there is in any analysis, the more verbiage surrounds it.
So far, I have yet to disprove that theory. :angel:
Roger Hicks
Veteran
The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable -- Wilde on fox-hunting
The unreadable in full pursuit of the incomprehensible -- Sontag on photography
Cheers,
R.
The unreadable in full pursuit of the incomprehensible -- Sontag on photography
Cheers,
R.
Roger Hicks
Veteran
You really need to read the entire trilogy, though: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragile. I'm not sure what you mean by "examples attributed to him": his arguments concern "long tail" events of low probability (or even complete unforseeability) but great impact.
Cheers,
R.
Sejanus.Aelianus
Veteran
Fair comments, Roger.
My point is that one man's "events of low probability (or even complete unforseeability)" are another man's "I've been warning you about this for umpteen years".
I simply think that he's pushing ideas, as new, that have been around in the real world for a very long time.
My point is that one man's "events of low probability (or even complete unforseeability)" are another man's "I've been warning you about this for umpteen years".
I simply think that he's pushing ideas, as new, that have been around in the real world for a very long time.
__--
Well-known
Try Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.
MITCH ALLAND/Potomac, MD
Download links for book project pdf files
Chiang Tung Days
Tristes Tropiques
Bangkok Hysteria
Paris au rythme de Basquiat and Other Poems
Roger Hicks
Veteran
No, I don't think so. In one sense, of course he is: people have long known that unexpected things happen. In another, he is trying to persuade us to rethink the priorities we give to things, and to be more honest in admitting that many things are easily explicable after the fact but no-one provided (or few took seriously) explanations before the fact.
In other words, what he's suggesting is a framework for thought and action. The examples he uses are merely to illustrate this thesis.
Cheers,
R.
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