Kerik said:
> I would argue
> that overemphasis on the technical aspects results in students that
> make perfect prints from perfect negatives of images made while
> they didn't know what they were doing.
I cut a bit more than I intended from Kerik's remarks -- but aside from
the fact that I don't know too many students who make perfect negatives
(teachers either!), I think he's making an overdue point. Terry replies
reductio ad absurdem, "don't you want your students to have *technical
competence*?" Come on -- there's a difference between washing your hands
after making mudpies and Lady Macbeth!
We've had several days of discussion which could lead a person who does
not see photography as a means of literal replication of "the original
scene" (which of course it can never be) to throw up her hands and say a
pox on all of you and your Time-Warner law.
Underlying the discussion have been several assumptions:
1. The more details the better
2. The more D-max the better
3. The sharper the better
4. The more tones the better
5. Whoever has the most of the above wins.
There is, as Terry (of all people) perfectly well knows, a difference
between "technical competence" and a death-dealing obsession with the
sub-atomic level, which is to say effects not readily -- or importantly --
evident to the unaided eye. But this discussion has been a kind of game,
and I wouldn't be a spoilsport, except --
There appears a growing uncritical submission to a certain strain of
contemporary thought. "Purity" in photography is born again, son-of-F-64,
what the rebels of the 1960s thought they had laid to rest, now well
entrenched in, of all places, alt-photo. (Pod People?)
The 5 commandments above are not immutable and eternal, from the mountain
top. In other times (say, circa 1900 to 1910) the biggest deal was ways to
"suppress unnecessary detail." Today that term would be an oxymoron, in
fact there could be no such thing as "unnecessary detail"...
This detail-worship, I suggest, distracts the mind and energies from more
critical issues -- such as "how many times have I seen this picture of
tree bark, sand dunes, adobe, or worn church steps before?"
Another good question would be, what indeed *does*, as Terry puts it,
"cause us to snap the shutter in the first place"? The "original scene"
itself? Or its likeness to previous certified masterpieces of photography?
Judy