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| photography as science or art ? |
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| silent_pumpkin |
 Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 2:16 pm Post subject: photography as science or art ? |
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Joined: 21 Mar 2005
Posts: 473
Location: Paris, France
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both probably...
i've been taking pictures for about 4 years now, trying to be a bit creative and do harmonious art so to say. then yesterday, i borrowed a photography manual at the library and everything seemed to be "parameterable" . loads of pictures of how to make it darker, clearer, blurrier, with rotating effects...
one can have all the visual aspects one wants just by setting the good parameters before even taking the picture (i'm not even talking about developping them). photoshop useless if you know how to use your camera properly (mine is an argentix camera)
now, i'm thinking i should not read that book further or else i'd lose the charming will to take pictures which i thought were magically nice whereas it seems like there are pure chemical and physical reasons behind the beauty.
of course the human photographer decides what to shoot in which exact angle and at the precised chosen moment, but it feels like it's not so much after all, i guess i should keep taking pictures with almost no knowledge of how it all works inside the black box but i'll still have all the magic of the result. or i should get desillusionned and learn how to make really like-i-wanted-looking pictures ?
i'm confused |
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| PreRaphaelite |
| Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 2:38 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 17 May 2005
Posts: 242
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You could get into the same kind of stew over painting - the technology of paint chemistry, the physics of colour harmony and so on. But although Monet (say) knew something of the prevailing colour theories in his day, his pictures are great for reasons that have nothing to do with any of that. His responses were mostly instinctive. A great artist can make a great picture with a stick and a bucket of mud - if he has to.
Similarly a great photograph can be taken with a pinhole camera, given the right person behind it and the appropriate scene in front of it.
My view, then, is that the two are separate. If you can't take a good photograph with a simple camera with limited technology (I'm assuming certain basic things as given - like quality of lens), then you're unlikely to take one with a battery of technological additions either. That doesn't mean to say that you might not in due course get better results with the gadgetry eventually; but the art is basically achieved by you, not the technology. |
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| silent_pumpkin |
| Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 3:55 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 21 Mar 2005
Posts: 473
Location: Paris, France
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yes, but photography is very different from painting for the reason of its easy to use/easy to handle.
enyone can take a picture and represent something, and even with a pinhole camera, it can be good. that's the whole thing, this availibity to everyone ; it's a very very democratic art if i may say so.
i wouldn't paint because i just have no talent for that. i can't draw. i can't make a picture of a man which wouldn't look like a cow or something. capacity to draw determines a lot in the result. photography however is based on different parameters such as instinct i think (well i thought til i read that aweful book) and children could take interesting photos : that's a mixture between documentary and esthetic IMO.
this documentary part that doesn't require much talent is less present in painting i guess. |
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| PreRaphaelite |
| Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 5:48 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 17 May 2005
Posts: 242
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Well, anyone can slosh paint on paper and manage to express something, however badly. And most people take equally bad photographs. They are just not so obviously bad because they can't help resembling the view in a documentary sense, but most people's snapshots have no artistic qualities at all, except by accident.
Your purpose I presume, Adrien, is not documentation primarily, but expression. Not so very different from the aim of a painter, I think. |
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