I don’t mean to sound too negative during this post however I have had a little rant slowly building up over the last few months and it is time to unleash it upon the world, well ok at least post it on this blog.
I first heard the question “Did it really look like that?” a good few years ago when new to photography, I found it a rather strange thing to ask and still do to this day. In fact I have lost count of how many times I have been asked by people looking at my work “Did it really look like that?”, almost as if I have taken a dull grey day and turned it into a magnificent sunset with hues of yellow and purple. And even after these years I still haven’t come up with a unified answer, “it looked like that to me” and “it is my interpretation of what nature threw at me” tend to work quite well although I am not entirely sure what the viewer asking the question is expecting as an answer.
I suppose the question is firm proof of the divide that exists for some people between art and photography, I am sure they would never question a painter if the scene depicted matches the real world or a sculpture for that matter however they perceive a photograph as a document and it should be an exact record as opposed to being the photographers take on the subject. For me photography is art and sits alongside painting, drawing, sculpture, music, literature to name just a few. But what is art, how do we classify art, for me I keep it simple and would class anything that involves a person creating something that influences or creates an emotional response in the viewer is art.
The second part of this rant is something I have come across from browsing the likes of Flickr and viewing other photographers work and all comes down to post processing and links nicely in with the first part of this rant. I have seen on more than a few photographs a comment such as “no processing” or “straight from camera”. Again I am not entirely sure what the photographer is expecting me to do with this information, am I supposed to perceive the photo in a different light than my first opinion? The polar opposite of this are people who going into great details saying what they have done, levels, curves, vignette, de-noise, etc, etc and I have even seen a couple of cases of people giving the amount of processing as a percentage so levels and curves maybe 30% adjustments… eh, what am I supposed to do with this info and what on earth would be 100% processing? This is firmly in the same camp as “not processed” and “Did it really look like that?”.
I think people are forgetting that at the end of the day it is the quality of the photograph that counts and to be honest I don’t care how you get there whether you use a jpeg straight out of the camera or a HDR photo made from multiple RAW files. A great photo is a great photo and I think both photographers and viewers need to accept that photography is art and perceive it that way.
