What I have noticed about western photographers is that they approach photography as if they are painting. Carefully thinking about the composition and techniques. Make sure everything is perfect according to a vision.<p>Japanese photographers are more spontaneous. Pictures look more like snap shots of everyday life. Often imperfect. Out of focus, crooked and blurry. They often just use a point and shoot on automode.<p>I just want to say that there are different ways to think about photography. I find the Japanese approach very interesting, because it uses unique properties of photography that is different from painting. Unlike painting you can take as many pictures as you want. You can take a camera everywhere. There are unique moments in everyday life that are beyond your imagination.<p><a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/daido-moriyama/" rel="nofollow">http://www.artnet.com/artists/daido-moriyama/</a><p><a href="https://sabukaru.online/articles/hiromix-shaping-the-identity-of-90s-japanese-female-youth" rel="nofollow">https://sabukaru.online/articles/hiromix-shaping-the-identit...</a><p><a href="https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/05/26/the-snapshot-photography-of-muga-miyahara/" rel="nofollow">https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/05/26/the-snapshot-photogr...</a><p><a href="https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/162-masahisa-fukase/overview/" rel="nofollow">https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/162-masahisa-fu...</a>
I've found this series of articles about art and photography very interesting, thanks to whoever has been posting them here on HN.<p>They helped me nail down some intuitions I had about photography, and clear some misconceptions. As someone who knows nothing about photography, I found it fascinating to learn about the process good photographers go through in order to get what they want out of a "plain" photo.
Photography is accepted as forensic evidence. Painting is not. This makes photography quite objective.<p>By photography I mean the act of merely taking a picture, not setting up the scene, setting the lights, directing the model or postprocessing.<p>As a photographer I don't even regard photography as art since you can't photograph whatever you want as opposed to painting or literature where you can depict whatever you want in any way you want.
I worked and did photography for quite a few years.<p>When working low end commercially you need to take the photo that the customer
is expecting.<p>That can mean making it very plain.<p>You take a photo of a sprocket that is evenly lit with a white background.
Snap. Usually this works out quite well and the client is happy.
I figure the vision is shared.<p>It can also mean that a woman wants a photo of herself as she sees herself
(Photoshop) Which is primarily a psychological challenge to understand how
she sees herself. (With a timer running).
The vision here is hers, and that is what I had to create.<p>I once had a client who wanted me to take photos of tufts of hair she was selling.
(not her own hair, she harvested it from human subjects)<p>That was a huge creative challenge.<p>It was all black hair.<p>A tuft of hair evenly lit does not look at all appealing.
A tuft of hair does not ever look appealing to begin with.<p>How do you get someone to look at a photo at some hair and go "yeah that".<p>The immediate thought was to find a find a model or mannequin to pose the
hair in context. Nope. Didn't want that.<p>That project became quite expensive for me before I figured out a way to make
her happy.<p>I think being a stubborn git I would probably have proceeded to find my own
tufts of black hair and continue shooting it until I got it right since
it became a real challenge.<p>When I worked for myself, and I work creatively, I can shape what I capture.
This is where the passion was for me.<p>If you are a top 1% photographer, clients hire you for your vision and creative style.
They give you big budgets, crews, etc.
I never got anywhere near that commercially.<p>At least one famous 1% photographer has such a well-oiled machine set up,
that they only have to show up and press the trigger.<p>But they have initial meetings with the client, give them a taste of celebrity.
Since nobody here mentioned - I strongly recommend Susan Sontag's book - "On Photography"<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography</a>
There's a great little video on this subject by Roger Ballen[1][2] called<p><i>"You may be a photographer, but are you an artist?"</i>[3]<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ballen" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ballen</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G-SJBxGskBg/T_7C3kB4awI/AAAAAAAAANQ/o44Y07h1RP0/s1600/Roger+Ballen+002.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G-SJBxGskBg/T_7C3kB4awI/AAAAAAAAA...</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sieUlqQIxT8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sieUlqQIxT8</a>
When I started learning photography years ago, my genre was street photography. It was practical, no fancy equipment needed, don't have to go far away. You just go out and start shooting. I was interested in documentary work, trying to capture truth "as objective as possible"<p>Then I found the works of Ansel Adams, the Westons (Edward, Brett), Aaron Siskind, Hiroshi Sugimoto, etc. Painters like René Magritte and Mark Rothko are also big inspirations. I conclude "making images" for me is far more interesting than "taking images".
Yes to this whole thing. I’ve been working on serializing some similar ideas about photography, and it’s very heartening to see someone else on a similar page. I never say it, because I know it would make me insufferable, but I always mentally object when someone talks about a photo ‘capturing’ something other than a pattern of light.
I am not sure I agree with this original hypothesis - does anyone really believe a photograph is a perfect recreation of truth? From most people I talk to they understand that it is somewhere in between art and documentation.<p>I am big into photography myself and it would take a lot of conscious effort to actually take photographs that were as close as possible to what the average human brain is perceiving from their own eyes. It is certainly possible with the right tools and mindset but would require careful lens selection and conscious choice of angles/perspective.<p>TLDR:<p>Ceci n'est pas une pipe
Famously, cubism as an art form arose in part as a response to photography, as well as what seemed like the creative dead-end involved with traditional lifelike representational art. The cubists thought "realistic" painting and conventional photography can both be thought of as deceptions. After all, the world is comprised of three dimensional objects that subtend through time, yet the canvas or the photographic image are 2D representations of a fixed moment in time that trick our eyes into interpreting the forms within as 3D. Picasso, Braque and others thought, let's embrace the fact that we are working on a 2D medium yet find a way to honestly convey the dimensionality of the world. Thus cubist works often depict subjects from various angles, such as the front and side of the face of Dora Maar in Picasso's well-known work [0]. Ironically in the 1980's painter David Hockney took the method full circle with his "joiner" photomontage style of photography[1].<p>I'm also reminded of how often when beautifully rich deep space photos are posted, particularly if a bright colorful image is shown [2], a common response is, "that's not a 'real' image, it's digitally processed 'false color,' right?" But all color is false color in a sense. It's a combination of the property of the object we're looking at, the processing limitations of our eyes, and our brain's subjective experience of color as a "qualia."[3] A set of choices made by our biology, you might say. The algorithms in digital cameras are designed to create images that roughly correspond to those biological choices, but that doesn't make them any more real than "false color" photos. In years past, conventional film emulsions attempted the same, and failed. In the 1950's and 1960's the newly emergent popular color emulsions were designed to make human skin look attractive in the developed snapshot. But of course not all human skin is the same color, so needless to say, mistakes were made. [4]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Dora_Maar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Dora_Maar</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pNsfZYQeE0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pNsfZYQeE0</a><p>[2] <a href="https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/screen/heic0515a.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/screen/heic05...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/angus-menuge-explains-why-red-is-such-a-problem-in-philosophy/" rel="nofollow">https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/angus-menuge-explains-why-red...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://time.com/5871502/film-race-history/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/5871502/film-race-history/</a>
Art is intent + execution.<p>Keep execution, remove intent: you get bathroom decoration, which definitely isn't art.<p>Remove execution, keep intent: you get modern art, which is still art.<p>Edit: this comment seems to be interpreted as being against modern art. It really isn't. It also doesn't try to imply that all of modern art is without execution (which would be a ridiculous proposition). The point is that there is still art when we remove execution. Some modern art has very elaborate execution, but sometimes modern art is pure idea, and then <i>it is still art</i>.