Re: Katharine Thayer's article in Lenswork

Ender100@aol.com wrote:
>
> Yes, and Katharine even got a round of applause from Bill Jay in "End
> Notes" in the subsequent issue.
> Congratulations Katharine.
>
> Long Live Pictorialism!
>
> Three things I like about the Pictorialists:
>
> 1.  They didn't take lot of closeup photographs of themselves doing
> mundane things.
> 2.  They didn't make large inkjet landscape pictures with
> oversaturated, unnatural colors.
> 3.  They didn't cover their images with a lot of text.
>

(Hehehe) Thanks!

I'm glad to hear you say that about the inkjet landscapes, Mark. Several
years ago I kept an article containing some digital landscape photos,
from View Camera I think, open on my desk for months. I wanted to
understand why I detested these pictures so much, so I made myself look
at them until I figured it out. It wasn't just the oversaturated and
unnatural colors, it was also that they contained very unnatural blacks
and whites. In nature, there is almost never a neutral black; there are
darks but they are usually brown or grey and full of bits or reflections
of other colors, rather than just black. And by the same token, there
are very few white whites in nature either (more than there are blacks,
but still even the whites usually reflect some color). But in these
digital landscapes, Photoshop had obviously been used to force neutral
blacks and whites, giving a very unnatural high contrast, and as a
result the scenes looked sterile and unnatural, unreal.
kt
Received on Wed Aug 25 20:28:24 2004