Why artistic/photographic redaction is more important now than ever before.
I was going to write a long post about the need for photographers to cull their photographic herd down to the few, the proud, the best. I had a bunch of quotes from A.D. Coleman and other big shots to back it up.
Let me sum it up fast and dirty. When Coleman wrote about the need for redaction, news had come out that the late photographer Gary Winogrand had left around 342,000 unseen and never printed negatives to the Museum of Modern Art. Coleman stated that a true photographer decides what should be printed and this flood of negatives hurts art. Coleman wrote this in the late 1990s.
There are over 10,000,000,000 images on the internet. There are too many photos out there. There are too many photos by the same photographers out there that only hurt the photographer's portfolio by diluting it with numbers, not quality or meaning.
I wrote on March 1, 2009, not all images are special. I quoted the animated movie, The Incredibles:
Dash: You always say 'Do your best', but you don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do?I also wrote:
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.
Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.
Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.
Not every photo is art... or is special. If you go through my thousands of negatives and digital photos, you will find 98% of them are fair at best and shit for most. If they were all special, then none of them would be special.That is why photographers need to only put up their best photos that support their body of work. Get rid of the clutter of your work. The internet has almost 10 billion too many crappy photos. Maybe a million of them have any value beyond a snapshot. We need to respect the art and the viewers by giving them only our best.
I make no self-aggrandizing statements that my photographs are worthy of value. At least though I know I am no longer going to show my "kind of good ones." They go to the garbage. The same goes for my writing and overall creative outputs. I am not going to put out blog posts just to show I am still existing, that is what Facebook is for. If it is not my best work, then it gets dumped to separate "the heap from the whole."
* The term Pixel Forest comes from a great set of writings by Dr. L. Please read her writing about the digital world we cohabitate. She sums up the ethereal-digital world perfectly.
Photo note - in accordance with my promise, no photo today because I could not find one that was worthy of posting.
This is the reason very few have value.
ReplyDeleteWhen you get to the high end photographers such as Carrie Leigh, Kim Weston, Leonard Nimoy, Lucien Clerque etc...you will find that they post very few images.
You know that they are holding back for print, exhibit and collector value.
Those that post hundreds if not thousands are only looking for immediate gratification.
It's always good - in my opinion - to be extremely critical of one's work. Digital technology has made it much too easy for a lot of mediocre photographers to make millions of mediocre images and post them all over the place. A side effect is the "it's good enough" mentality. For those of us who struggled to earn a living with photography, and who spent years working at our craft, this is a real problem. Wannabe photographers give away their work just to see it in print and editors are happy to use the work that they get for free because, while it might not be the best, it's "good enough". I know there are people who still respect the art and the craft of photography, but they are hard to find sometimes.
ReplyDeleteKarl, what a brilliant post. You give it quick and dirty and no one can miss the point or disagree. The comment about instant gratification sums it up.
ReplyDeleteI see this in education as well. How can any work for a class be special when each and every person in the class expects and believes he or she deserves an A for effort. That same attitude goes hand in hand with photographers expecting and believing each and every one of their photographs is great art.
Thank you for posting this.