Category Archives: Ideas

Commentary, Ideas

A Forum Post About Photography and ‘Realism’

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From time to time I share here a post I made elsewhere. Recently I posted something in one of those familiar threads lamenting that some photographer did something in an image that “altered reality” in some way. Yes, that topic. Again.

With apologies to all of you who know that the following is pretty darn obvious, here is the post:

The notion that a photograph can portray something equal to the original reality of the subject is a myth. All photographs lie.

This is not news to those who are familiar with the history of photography or with philosophical musings about the medium. The process of determining what to include and what to leave out, deciding when to click the shutter, selecting the time of day or season of year to make the exposure, chosing whether to shoot black and white (which isn’t remotely real!) or color, using filters on the camera, using filters in digital or optical/chemical post, using shift and tilt lenses, controlling DOF with aperture selection, choosing what paper to print on, selecting one frame over another, choosing how to describe and explain explain or simply title the image, dodging and burning, choosing methods of developing film for their effect on the image, shooting Velvia (!), attaching a polarizing filter, adding a hood to control flare, using flare as part of the image, brushing that bug off the leaf, adding a bug to the leaf, waiting for the bug to land/fly away, picking the prettier bird out of the flock rather than the other one with the bent wing, choosing to point your camera in the direction that excludes the power line or the buildings, waiting for the wining smile, waiting for the smile to to away, shooting with very short focal lengths, shooting with very long focal lengths, and on and on and on and on…

It is impossible for a photograph to be an analog of “reality.” At best it can suggest something that the photographer saw or felt in the presence of  that reality or something about how the photographer views it. It can evoke a memory, an association, or an imagination in the viewer. It cannot portray objective components of the “reality” of the subject such as the cool breeze on your face, the smell of pine trees, the moisture in the air, your sore feet from the long walk, the warmth of sun on the back of your neck, the sound of birds and wind – all of which are components of the “reality” we experience in the presence of the actual subject.

And I really don’t care. If the only thing that I thought photography could do was “capture” an objectively accurate rendition of reality I wouldn’t bother to make photographs – which would always fail to equal the experience of that original reality. I’d get rid of may camera and just go experience it. (Which I actually did for a time, but that is not a story for this post.)

But that isn’t what photography does, and it would be far less than photography can do. One of the most interesting and humane things it does is it offers us a view into the mind and world of the person of the photographer. Frankly, in the end I’m far more interested in what the photograph tells me about the person who made the image, and perhaps about myself, than I am in the extent to which the photograph pretends that it can stand in for the real.

Imagining that the purpose of photography is merely to “capture” the real, thus creating a sort of second-best shadow image of the real, is simplistic and naive. It is also nearly completely contrary to the history and development of the craft and art of photography. It is essentially impossible to find photographs that are totally “pure” – whatever that even means.

And when I view a great and powerful photograph, virtually the last thing I ask myself is, “is this a real thing?” I think about the effect it has on me, what it tells me or suggests to me about the world, its pure aesthetic power as an image, its intrinsic beauty, the associations I draw between it and my experience.

G Dan Mitchell Photography | Flickr | Twitter (follow me) | Facebook (“Like” my page) | LinkedIn | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, Ideas, Thinking Aloud, Tongue in Cheek

Telling Stories About Our Photographs

18 Comments

I am as guilty as (OK, more guilty than) anyone else when it comes to writing a lot of words about my photographs! This is ironic in a way, since I believe that, for the most part, successful photographs should be able to say whatever they have to say without a lot of verbal explanation or justification. (There are clearly exceptions to this “rule,” and this is not to say that there isn’t a lot to talk about in photographs.) But some people seem to enjoy the descriptions, so I offer a bit of back story about every photograph, and I love to discuss the photos with folks who share my interest.

Recently I read a post about a fine landscape photograph that someone had produced – the photograph was one of those that is good enough to make me think about how I might create such an image. As I write this now, I have forgotten whose post it was and precisely which photograph it was about. But something that struck me about this post was the tremendously compelling and somewhat scary story that the photographer told about getting the photo. It included things like standing for days in tremendously difficult and seemingly dangerous weather conditions, traveling miles and miles across difficult terrain to find precisely the image that he/she had previsualized, and the tremendous good fortune of finding this perfect image after days and days of enduring challenges that normal people would not or perhaps could not endure.

Some such stories may be true. (Though more often I suspect that they are considerably embellished, but what’s wrong with a bit of fun fiction now and then? :-) But sometimes I wonder if the effect of the photograph would be the same without the spine-tingling story-telling? And I wonder to what extent some viewers tend to look at (or not) photographs that are not accompanied by such compelling and daring tales? What is the balance between viewers being intrigued by the apparently adventure-filled lives lived by photographers and viewers reacting to the intrinsic quality of the photographs themselves?

With this in mind, I offer two descriptions of events associated with the creation of photographs. Think about how the stories affect your perception of the images – for better or worse. ;-)

Story #1

It was a tough morning in the arid desert valley. The oppressive early season heat had arrived and it was over 90 degrees shortly after sunrise. Raging wind threatened a dust storm, and I had been suffering in the heat and dust and dryness for many days. However, this remote location being a place of remarkable extremes, the surrounding mountain peaks were topped by several inches of recent snowfall, rendering many areas inaccessible to anyone unprepared for serious alpine travel. So I faced a choice — endure another day in the sun-blasted furnace of the valley or attempt to struggle up into the alpine zones of the towering mountains and make a photograph. Continue reading Telling Stories About Our Photographs →

Commentary, Ideas, Thinking Aloud

How Do We Really Shoot?

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This is probably going to be a sort of “thinking out loud” post, so forgive me if I’m sharing some half-formulated thoughts. I may even have to take back some of what I write afterwards! It is complicated. (Slightly revised on 8/14/11)

This afternoon I was reading an article about a photographer who produces some excellent and compelling work that I like quite a bit. The photographer’s identity is not important in the context of what I’ll write, since the person’s story only served to remind me of many similar stories I have read elsewhere regarding quite a few other photographers. Aside from the commentary on this person’s wonderful photographs, there were two other threads I noticed in the article – and I recognized both of them from a lot of other writing by and about photographers that I’ve seen, specifically about landscape/nature photographers.

First, I noticed that there was almost as much discussion about the circumstances in which the photographer works as there was about the photography itself – and the circumstances seemed quite dramatic. (It seems curious to me that photographers are often more interested in writing about and readers more interested in these circumstances than in the actual photographs, but that is something for another post…) There were stories of working in freezing cold with the risk of frostbite, of traveling to wild and seemingly dangerous places, and of encountering scary and threatening circumstances, working alone, coupled with an impression that the photographer was unable to resist the call to “risk it all” for “the shot.” It all sounds quite dramatic and even dangerous! That, however, is going to be a subject for a future post.

The second thing that caught my attention was a claim that the photographer had imagined a specific shot and then had gone to a certain place and spent a week waiting for that shot. The photograph that was the result of these efforts is, indeed, a very wonderful photograph and one that I find quite compelling. But from my own experience in photographing similar subjects in similar places and circumstances, the claim of seeing the image before arriving and then waiting for exactly the imagined image to appear didn’t quite add up, especially given the ephemeral nature of the effects and conditions that make the image in question so powerful.

It is this second issue that I’m interested in exploring a bit right now – the question of whether we simply capture the image we saw in our mind’s eye before arriving on the scene, or perhaps do something a lot more complex and, I think, much more intuitive and instantaneous. Do we arrive on the scene and wait for the thing we imagined to happen, or do we arrive on the scene and find a way to photograph what we find there? Or, what is the balance between this opposite poles? Continue reading How Do We Really Shoot? →

Commentary, Ideas

How I Title My Photographs, and Why

14 Comments

If you follow my photography you might notice that the titles I give to my photographs are not typically very “poetic,” instead tending to be relatively straightforward labels of the subjects. If a photograph is of a place I often simply refer to the location in the title, perhaps with the addition of a word or two identifying aspects such as season or time of day. If the photograph features a snow-covered tree, my title will likely be along the lines of “Snow-Covered Tree, Clouds.”

Not very creative, but I have my reasons.

Some photographers prefer to provide evocative and poetic titles for their images. To make up a few examples that sound like what I’m thinking of, you might see titles along the lines of “Endurance,” “At the Ends of the Earth,” or “Standing Against the Storm.” Another approach is to use enigmatic titles along the lines of “What She Saw,” “It Came in the Night,” “Sometimes it Gets Old,” “I Think of You When the Light Fades.”  (To the best of my knowledge these are not the actual titles of anyone’s actual photographs… but you never know! If it turns out that they are real, the connections were entirely coincidental.)

I’m not generally a fan of that approach to naming photographs. I hope that the photograph may speak for itself through whatever it is and says as a photograph. If the subject and its execution as a photograph evoke thoughts of strength or beauty or wonder or something else compelling, then I prefer to let the photograph do the talking. If it doesn’t have this effect on its own, I’d rather not try to gussy it up by adding a title to compensate for what it doesn’t intrinsically “say” as a visual image.

In addition, often the photograph is not “about” anything other than the subject itself – it is simply presented as is for consideration on its own. Not every photograph of the sea has to try to explicitly be about loneliness or a distant shore or an emotional storm or calm thoughts or a long voyage, real or metaphorical – sometimes it is just a beautiful image of the sea, with all of the interesting (we hope!) visual elements of place, light, color, texture, form, and so forth. Not every photograph of an urban environment must try to suggest a story of alienation, or urbane sophistication, or people in a rush, etc. – it may just present elements of the urban scene for your consideration as imagery. You are free—encouraged, even—to make your own associations and find whatever meaning of your own you can in the image.

I suppose that I do need to qualify all of this a bit.

First, this is my point of view, and I understand and appreciate that others may feel that the title is part of the message of the photograph. In fact, there are great examples of photographs in which the title really is a significant part of what “makes the photograph work.” In some cases an ironic dissonance between the nature of the image and the title can be effective, for example.

Second, I don’t necessarily think that description of the context of the photograph is a bad thing. (I’d better not think that – or I’d have a lot of explaining to do concerning how I present photographs in this blog!) I think it is reasonable to inform viewers about the subject and say something about the circumstances of the creation of the photograph, for a bunch of reasons that I won’t enumerate here.

Third, I suppose that my bias might be traced to several sources. One may be the fact that many (but not all) of the photographers whose work I admire tend to take a similar approach. Another may be from my background in music, where a piece may simply be what it is and not have a specific non-musical meaning at all.

One more thing…

I decided a few years ago to mostly avoid using photograph titles that identify places that are best not named. Sometimes this is simply because the photograph is more about the immediate subject (those “rocks and trees”) than about the large and specific area and its identity. In other cases those “Trees and Rocks” are in a location whose character might be harmed by too many visits by too many people. If I were to name the location with too much specificity this could make me complicit in a process that accelerates the destruction of the very things that make it so precious— its quiet, peace, remoteness, and even its loneliness. In the past, when news traveled more slowly and among smaller numbers of people, naming these places had a much less dramatic effect. However, today, any mention is instantly cataloged and entered into searchable databases, cross-linked with other references, ready to be looking up and attached to full GPS coordinates and detailed directions for access. In this world I think it is better to be circumspect about such places. And, no, I’m not trying to “keep my places secret.” I’m happy for other people who deeply love and appreciate them as I do to discover them in the same ways I do… and to join me in sharing a responsibility for their protection and safety.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.