CHRIS NUTT

Karina Nikolaeva.

I’ve just finished reading “Art and Fear” by Bayles and Orland  and had to share this from the last chapter of the work.  Photographers these days seems to concentrate on technical aspects - the best camera, the sharpest lens, the newest PS action, etc. Indeed it is rare to find any web-based photography “education”, for example,  that, in Bayles and Orlands paraphrased words, moves photography from from craft to art.  I see organizations like PSA and my own camera club attaching overwhelming importance to technical aspects, the craft - so much that, indeed, the primary message of a photograph is deemed to be technical prowess. 

You should read my response to a thread on Model Mayhem that I responded to a while back - the essence of which was “..if you can’t take a good picture with an iPhone, you are not a very good photographer..” -  oh the negative feedback I received was incredible.  One hundred megapixels makes the best pictures, of course.  Sir, you are a slave to technique.

Here’s the section from the book….

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“…Artists who need ongoing reassurance that they’re on the right track routinely seek out challenges that offer clear goals and measurable feedback – which is to say, technical challenges. The underlying problem with this is not that the pursuit of technical excellence is wrong, exactly, but simply that making it the primary goal puts the cart before the horse. We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than anyone else. We remember those who made the art from which the “rules” inevitably follow.“

              ” More insidiously, technical standards have a way of taking on all the trappings of aesthetic standards. There is widespread agreement, for instance, that it’s a genuine challenge to impact rich blacks and subtle high values to a photographic print. At some point, however, this seemingly neutral observation gave rise (especially among West Coast landscape photographers) to a moral imperative that photographs should display such tonal perfection. As this genre established itself, criteria for judging a print increasingly concentrated on the virtuoso technical performance needed to produce the desired tones. Subtlety of tone became, often quite literally, the primary content….“

               "To the viewer, who has little emotional investment in how the work gets done, art made primarily to display technical virtuosity is often beautiful, striking, elegant..and vacant. To the artist, who has an emotional investment in everything, it’s more a question of which direction to reach. Compared to other challenges, the ultimate shortcomings of technical problems is not that they’re hard, but that they’re easy…”

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I’ve made that last sentence BOLD.  Let me paraphrase…. anyone can make a technically perfect image.  And it is easy to judge (we make lists of criteria).  But making an image that transcends technical perfection and communicates - that IS the artists struggle.

Jerry

Ted Orland =