Orangutan said:
dolina said:
The very act of framing distorts "reality".
No one disputes this fact, and it doesn't affect the main argument at all. Take for example
http://petapixel.com/2011/10/04/an-eye-opening-look-at-how-many-conflict-photos-are-staged
The primary question is
whether the distortion is within bounds of expectation of the customer/client.
- If you are your own customer/client then your expectations are met
- If your customers/clients see your work as photojournalism then it should meet the expectation of journalism as "the first rough draft of history" (quote attributed to Philip L. Graham)
- If your customers/clients see your work as naturalism, then it needs to meet fidelity to that ideal
- If your customers/clients see your work as "art," then we find ourselves in the grey area, and need to think a little deeper.
...
The same is true for artistic photography: you can edit your work in any way you want, but you must leave some reasonable clue to your customers/clients that it's manipulated. You need not tell them exactly how it's manipulated, they can ask if they're curious.
I also have a question for all of you who believe aesthetics are the only standard: would the aesthetic value of your work be diminished if you labeled your piece as having been manipulated? If yes, what does that tell you?
"Would the aesthetic value of your work be diminished if you labeled your piece as having been manipulated? If yes, what does that tell you?"
No, it would not. It does not matter at all. It would however be a total nuisance and inconvenience if image creators would be obliged having to "disclose something" with every photograph - but only if it was modified after capture. To me it is a lawyers approach to the matter. We don't need that in the creative process, because lawyers will be all over our pictures later on, anyways.
Things should not come to a point of "political correctness" or even a legal requirement that all photographs presented to viewers must be accompanied by small print legalese "disclosure statements", similar to product manuals that need to "disclose", that "electricity can be harmful to humans" and "wet pets must never be dried in this microwave oven or in that tumble dryer". I resent that kind of approach for photography and creation of visual content. Similarly ridiculous as any novel having to have a preface stating "any similarity with real persons, blablabla ... legalese ... is purely coincidental and unintentional". Totally unnecessary.
Of course client/viewer expectations are a thing to keep in mind. These excpectations are high on the list in terms of delivering what a client wants - as far as image contents and visual style are concerned. But they are very low on the list when it comes to an image creator's freedom to create images as he/she sees fit and to disclose something, nothing or everything about the circumstances and specific processes involved to actually create a photograph, an image.
Most of the time, viewers/clients expectations are also rather unclear, diffuse, vague and very different from one viewer to the next. Even in journalism. Readers of tabloids certainly have different expectations regarding what content should be covered by their papers and how it should be presented, compared to readers of so-called "quality papers". Interestingly enough, the latter consider themselves to be much better educated, intelligent and smarter than the tabloid-consuming masses, but fall much more easily for the totally ridiculous concept, "that reality can in any way be faithfully represented" in imagery and written text.
Or let's go back to the year 1508: what expectations might pope Julius II have had, when he commissioned the ceiling painting for the sistine chapel from Michelangelo Buonarotti. I imagine, he might have said something along the lines ... "Mike, I want you to paint me the ceiling of this chapel. Make it as grand as you possibly can. You may want to put the creation of man in the center of that painting, as that is a central point of the theological truths (!) we preach about around here. The rest you decide. I'll pay you well, you get an advance, and the rest upon finishing the work and if I really like it. So get started asap and finish it quickly, I am not so young any longer and want to live to see this painting and to brag about it to my visitors." Blessing, end of briefing.
Do you think, Julius wanted to know, if and how Michelangelo manipulated viewers views to create a full "3D illusion" via elaborate distortion of proportions and scale, use of colours, paint and Pigment to make the scene "come alive"? And were the pope's expectations for the work likely met or not?
Or when QE2 aks Annie Leibovitz to shoot her portrait? What are her expectations? Like the same as any other person asking to be portrayed: that the artist makes you "look as good" as he/she is able to. That the resulting image be "fit for a king", pardon me - for a queen. Expectation met? Probably. Post processing involved? Most definitely. Details of modifications made? Disclosure needed, that "this image contains all sorts of modifications compared to what the old lady depicted really looks like in plain cloths and in bright daylight?
Irrelevant!
And take Andreas Gursky's fabulous masterpiece "Rhine II" referencd in this threads. Now, here comes one german, in the last year of the 20th century (1999) and manages to create his image of the "German Rhine", totally and utterly killing centuries and centuries of romanticist painting tradition of that mythical body of water, of that artery of travel and trade, of the "lovely landscape", of the ever-same moonlit castles and ruins, of half-naked stupid blond syrens and even more stupid horny male sailors, of nibelungs, of fighting between between french and germans, of gold and treasures, of chemical works and heavy industry on the waterfront, of nazis fighting american tanks crossing that last remaining bridge across the water, into the german heartland? Gursky just transcends all of this in only one image. It shows "the unaltered, bland and plain reality" more faithfully than any unprocessed sunday snapshooters shot of the loreley rock. Gursky did it in his own, precision-clean handwriting. He did it as best as he could.
And guess what the biggest manipulation is all of the images mentioned here is? The one huge manipulation without which Rhine II would never have fetched a cool 4 millions? Bunarotti would not have received 6000 gilders plus expenses from Julius II? Isn't it obvious! SIZE! Had Buonarotti painted gods index finger spark-plugging life into poor adam on a 10x20 piece of cardboard, neither he nor the image would be remembered. Had Gursky not printed his Rhine II image in museum wall dimensions, but as a 4x6" or only shown it 1200 pixels wide on uncalibrated office PC monitors ... it "would be worth" ... not much. Rhine II is an impressive 186x363 cm in size. Big. Bold. New. Never seen the Rhine in this way. That's what counts. It does not matter, whether Gursky stamped away some ugly middle-class homes, or some equally ugly factories along the far river bank or whether he magically managed to find a clean enough stretch along the river - even in 1999. No need to explain or disclose. The truth of the image is "self-evident". Its "relation to reality/realities" any viewers guess. That's part of what makes it interesting. And what makes it so pricey.
Or Robert Capas' Falling Soldier in the spanish civil war? We still don't know for sure, how "manipulated" it is. Whether it was totally staged or not, whether it really shows the very split second a man finds his death by a bullet or whether nobody was harmed at all in front of the camera when the image was captured. Now, that was a purely photojournalistic image, not "art". And it shaped viewers perceptions of that war, and "made history." It also changed the public's expectation about what images a war reporter should show ... "right in the middle of the action, fighting, killing, blood and gore", delivered to the comfort of their safe homes. Manipulated or not ... totally irrelevant!
Sanj' lions? Viewer/client expectations? To see an image of a magnificient animal - lion, sole and main subject - in all its glory. Do visual disturbances in that image help meet that expectation? No, they don't! So go ahead and clean up the act. The image is so much better without those visually disturbing blurry birds. The creator of the image has the very right to wipe those birds out of visual existence in his images. That's a true creator's privilege!
Viewers? Get to see the best possible image Sanj could get of that lion that day. In all its glory. Disclosure? Utterly unneccessary!
Whether the image was captured in a zoo or in a specific national park, whether it shows a wild or trained animal ... only matters, if the photographer has been specifically paid (!) to go to a specific place and bring back pictures only of wild animals captured only there. Or if the image's caption when presented to viewers says something specific to that effect. "This is an image of a wild lion, captured in Masai Mara, 11th waterhole from left, March 20, 2015 and by the way, the image was postprocessed in different aspects, including stamping out of some viuallly distrubing blurry birds overhead of the lion " ... now does that help? Does it make an yviewer feel any better or any different about the image shown?
So, to wrap it up: forget about viewers/clients expectations. Go and shoot and create the way you see the world through your mind, through your eyes, through your lens. Do what it taks and what you want to create your images, but make them as best as you can, as true to *your own expectations* as possible. Do not disclose much about how you created them. Stay away from any sort of competition run by old socks with petty minds and petty rules from times long past. Make your own visual rules. Break expectations. If possible, show something in a way that no one else has shown it before. And, much easier to do: make your images as large as possible. If you succeed in breakin the rules, you'll break the bank. ;D
Or at least, nobody can bog you down with their yesteryear expectations or with demands to disclose your "manipulations of (their perceptions of) reality" ...
PS: probably the first time Gursky, Michelangelo, Capa, Leibovitz and Sanj are mentioned in one posting in this forum. Break expectations. Do something new. Make your own rules. Just wish my images were as good and bold as my writing. Well, talk is cheap ...
