This arose because you inferred from the S & P debate, which given MJC's telling
point, I hope is now over, that, as some people are interested in how to get the
utmost out of a process and understand how things work, that they will apply
that approach to everything they do. As I said to you, off the list, I revel in
all sorts of distortions but sometimes the subject calls for the best
technically that the medium can give.
Do you remember the paradox of the Cretan who said that all Cretans are liars.
The solution is, of course, that he did not lie all the time.
You say:
t 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!
I have already replied to Kerik that it is a 'reductio ad absurdum' and a false
inference to take the argement to the extreme in either direction.
You say:
"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."
That was not the point of that discussion either.
You are again drawing false inferences in the following ( my comments in
brackets):
Underlying the discussion have been several assumptions:
1. The more details the better (that may be true sometimes but but always)
2. The more D-max the better (ditto)
3. The sharper the better (ditto)
4. The more tones the better (ditto)
5. Whoever has the most of the above wins. ( ditto or round objects)
You say:
"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."
That is why i felt that I was having to defend a truism but enough of that.
You say:
" 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 F64 lot were not new they were just returning to the ideas of forty years
before. Ancients such as ourselve have seen these fashions circle like vultures.
To mix the metaphor, I like 'alt' because we tend to avoid that Maelstrom. If I
want to produce an image
where either Whistler or Frederick or Walker Evans could be inferred as an
influence, that is my freedom
You say:
"e 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?" "
Hear ! Hear !
You say :
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? "
A good, but not the only way to start in photography is to attempt to emulate
the style of established role models and to spend a lot of time looking at good
pictures whatever the style or period. If you have any creative ability at all
you own style should resolve itself from that experience. You grow out of the
copying stage but observers will almost always be able to infer influences. Your
approach is going to be somewhat restricted if you say ' I cannot photograph
that as someone is going to think that I am copying Frederick or Walker Evans.'
Most observers are never going to have heard of either.
As to the question as to what makes me press the shutter when I am trying to
produce my own pictures, it is an amalgam of all those influences and rules and
wishes not to observe rules that make up me and tell me that I am going to get a
good picture. Maybe that is why two of one's most effective photographic tools
are the things on the end of your legs.
Terry