The camera verses the human eye and interpretation.

[bmattock]

adams was at the end of long line of photographers who strived to prefect the art in a technical way, he came closer to the perfect print than anyone previously had and was an irrelevance who came along towards the end a long tradition that was fairly unimportant.

Sorry that's unfair he was irrelevant and parochial, and looks almost as out of date as some of the Nan Ray photos; his other work is, however, still fairly relevant

(I like the contentious stuff with someone who can take a joke 🙂 )

I agree with you about Adams. I went to see his exhibit at DIA and was left cold and unimpressed. Perfect prints - but I really preferred his earlier work for their emotional content.

The problem was that Adams is still worshiped like a god, and he and his buddies completely obliterated any respect for pictorialism and other genres. Man Ray's work may well be dated, but there are many unexplored caches of work in that line that were produced behind the Iron Curtain between the 1930's and 1970's that are now coming to light in the West that are still fresh and relevant (to my way of thinking). And they show, I believe, that photography is a lot more capable of artistic expression than many realize or care to realize.

How many here bemoan the happy snapper's take on the world, and yet they cannot and will not break free of that mold themselves? They may strive for a cleaner, more deliberate composition, they may be more careful of telephone poles and lamps growing out of people's heads, but they'd never think of forcing a perspective that was not in their normal field of view, or getting down on the belly like a reptile, or borrowing a ladder and looking down on their subject, etc, etc, etc.

They still think a photograph is what they see with their eyes, at the height they are from the ground, a still frame taken from the moving picture of their lives and presented as a 'straight' and 'truthful' image as if that meant something important. They suppose a forced and ugly dichotomy between the inartfulness they suppose exists when people manipulate photographs using tools like photoshop and the same manipulation when applied with a brush to a canvas, when in truth there are no differences between them in terms of creative expression.

If I wanted to show a photograph of something that looked like my eyes saw it, I'd just give you the location and you could go there yourself and see it. I'd rather show you the thing the way I experienced it or the way I saw it in my mind's eye. If that's not the same as painting, I don't know what is.

 

[Sparrow]

I only take snaps, so I should be offended by a lot of that, but then some of the impressionists did snaps on purpose http://www.worldart.com.au/images/degas-horses1.jpg

however, I'm lucky in that I can transfer my minds eye onto paper if I wish

 

[Gumby]

I'm not sure it is bemoaning, Bill. In fact, I'm not quite sure what exactly bemoaning involves. It is fairly well acknowledged that it is easier for most pepole to criticize (meaning 'evaluate') than it is to create. That's how we are wired; that's how we learn.

There is a role for documentary photogprahy. That's why it has existed since the dawn of photography. Not everyone has the ability to go to the GPS location that you think is a good view, nor can they replicate what you saw. That's why I hope you'll keep taking snappy shots rather than posting LatLongs. But you know that already... I assume you took an extreme position mostly to engage folks in conversation.

 

[Carlsen Highway]

WHo said the foundation of all pictorial art is drawing? I dont know. Maybe I did once. 😀

I grew up drawing - had to - like other peoples fathers being coal miners and them accompanying him down t'pit, we had to learn how to draw since he was a landscape painter, among other things. From the age of seven or eight were traipsed around the countryside, drawing, pencil, charcoal, blak and white in oil colour....landscapes, old barns and abandoned farm houses was his favourite subjects.
It seemed natural to move onto black and white photoraphy in my teens, I quickly cottoned on to Cartier Bresson for some reason - it was years later I learned that he had given up photography for drawing.

Some observations from a photographer that draws also, for what they are worth.
Drawing is hard. There is no gift, and an artist is sold short when people say, yep, hes talented...you dont get born with it, you have to learn it. Its hard like digging ditches is hard. Its not relaxing if your doing it seriously. Not something you want to take up in your retirement to pass pleasant evenings.
But the joy of making something so delicate just with a piece of paper and a bit of charcoal - making something perhaps beautiful out of literally nothing...is a magic trick, and I dont mean a card trick, I mean a magic trick, like the Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Photogrpahy can be similiar, but as sparrow said, photography falls on what it cannot exclude - whatever else is in the picture, too much detail, unwanted shadows...
When you are drawing, you are often drawing what the eye will see of physical reality - and light is just as inportant to a person who draws or paints as a photgrapher - but you are also drawing your idea of the object.
Physical reality simply represented is oftentimes boring drawings. The same as many photographs, there nothing to them, although techincally perfect.

Where it is intersting is that drawing is deliberate inclusion or exclusion of certain things, and you will find its better to leave out more than include, because teh viewers brain will fill in the gaps, and no one can draw as well as the human brain can imagine - use the viewers brain for your own ends! - while this is much harder to do in photography, however I believe this is why black and white photography is so successful and still with us many decades after colour film was invented. For the saem reason, in the B&W pictures, the viewer completes the picture, it understands it as an incomplete picture of what was there and fills in the blanks, same as a drawing, just to lessor extant.
What is interesting again with phtoography, is that often this effect can be forced by photgraphs that are a little mysterious, (for example, HCB's picture of the boy against the wall who has thrown a ball in the air out of frame) forcing the viewer to find meaning by searching the image.
In truth there are a great many photographs that achieve this unintentionally. But the risk of courese is if the viewer knows there is "no more' to the picture, and that it proabbly wasnt intentional, then it just becomes meaningless, adn they resent not having the 'whole picture'...

I could write more but now my brain is getting frazzled cause my fingers cant keep up.

I am not sure if I am making a lot of sense.