About sixty years ago Berenice Abbott published an essay "Photography At the Crossroads". I first read it a few months ago and was struck by its still relevant arguments.
There was a sigh of recognition as I read how Henry Peach Robinson exported his plague "Pictorial Photography, 1869" from England and photographers here who had up till then been producing solid, real and valid documents came to copy the composition of paintings, attaching to them simplistic soppy sentimental titles, i.e. "Poor Joe", "Fingers of Morning" or "Kiss of Dew".
Only yesterday I saw one recent image of a bride with a classic title evoking romantic claptrap memories of days gone by. Good grief! Well that's what happens I guess when one browses other photographers' sites. The only sad thing is that this particluar image is part of The Professional Photographers' of America Loan Collection. Groucho Marxx's statement about not wishing to belong to a particular group springs to mind :)
In a previous post I touched upon what makes an image good and promised that I would save my rant on content for another day. Ms. Abbott's words seem to fit here;
'A photograph is not a painting" "It is not just a pretty picture, not an excercise in contortionist technique and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term, selectivity."
How we select, first our subjects and then the treatment we use to create images is the foundation upon which all our imagery is dependant upon. If we select subjects about which we care little or nothing or even have no respect for then our resultant images will invariably be worth nothing to us and to the viewers.
Last week I took some time out to view an exhibit of Elliott Erwitt's work at the International Center of Photography. If you are in NYC between now and the end of August this exhibition is truly worth a visit.
"it (photography) has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them". Elliott Erwitt.
Erwitt's are simple, straightforward images with great "content", yes there's some humor in many of them, however, there is a tremendous, almost overwhelming, amount of power in all of them.
When we are honest with ourselves and allow our feelings to guide us we "see", feel even, much more clearly and we are then free to capture real images. When we practice this we can rely less on artifact, textures, olde-world stains and such and our images may have more value both for ourselves and for our viewers today and in the future.
It would be good to leave the crossroads behind us.
