Photographers' Nature is Essentially Hybrid

[df cardwell]

From the moment Talbot was moved to find a way to fix the image he saw in his camera obscura, PHOTOGRAPHY existed in a spectrum transcending art and science.

Crossing the lines of Scientist and Artist is an obvious case of a hybrid,
but there are many factors that contribute to the process of Making Good Photographs. Can we identify them ?

I'll venture a starting place.

Speaking more than one language is a powerful factor in being able to make a good photograph, and is far more important than owning, say, a densitometer.



...

[livemoa]

I think curiosity is important, at least to me and a desire to explore internal and external events and feelings.

Others talk of music, or an understanding/appreciation of it. After all, we often talk of rhythm in an image...

Technique is important, but often this overwhelms what could be great work.

Hmmmmm, I want to think more about this.

[jd callow]

As a craftsperson one learns through doing. It becomes second nature for an illustrator to know how to push, pull, bend and drag a quill to meet his/her mind's image of how s/he wants the line to appear. As an artist s/he can understand the emotional or intellectual value to a line type. Possibly between the two or as a consequence of the two, lies the subjective line; the line that suggests form and meaning. Take the same scenario and change it from a line to a block of colour and you have the foundation of the two schools of endeavor that made up "Abstract expressionism."

The idea or the drivers for the movement were artistic and intellectual or semi scientific. Intellectual or scientific in that it sought to look at the psychology of the image, based upon its root components.

To me there is much significance in this as a model to be applied to photography and art in general. First, there is always the relationship between the technical facility of the creator and the intellectual ability to understand the power of the medium. You have to be able to both know what to say and how to say it. The second item is that their distillation or abstraction was/is an undeniable truism, but also a very heavy burden. The resulting work ranged form some of the finest art made in the 20th century (if not some of the most powerful in humankind's history) to the most impenetrable and sterile depictions of colour and or line.

At some point the technical/intellectual overwhelms all else. A perfectly seamless application of colour, may, on an intellectual level, be the purest way to allow that colour’s emotive value to be represented; It may also be that by achieving theoretical perfection one drains the subject of all life; or it may be that the pursuit of anything in the absolute causes the requisite balance that creates subjectivity to be lost.

It is my personal approach to photography to try and develop my technical facility based upon my needs to be expressive, my curiosity, and over time through the pursuit.

The knowledge of what I am doing and what I want to say needs to be inherent in the act. It needs to be 2nd nature. My best work is done in a zen like selfless state. I don’t think about it, I simply perform the dance using the skills and understanding that have gotten me to this point.

YMMV

<edit> I'm not sure I answered the OP </edit>

[dwross]

df, livemoa, jd:

wow guys, the three of you have written the thesis for an entire book on the nature of creativity. I sense that this thread, as it weaves to and fro, will be the backbone of hybrid - as important as the technical info.

My small contribution is an opinion about teaching and learning. I think we all understand the classic Teacher/Student relationship: One learned individual transmits a body of knowledge to the younger (i.e. not-learned) generation. That model, turned on its head, is of course the stuff of Sunday comics - the elementary school student teaching the teacher about computers.

When I contrast APUG with Hybrid, I think I see a stronger inherent appreciation for the newer model among the regular contributors to hybrid. (I haven't spent enough time at APUG to know everything that goes on there, so feel free to flame me on this opinion.) The folks who are venturing into digital are learning at the same time as they are probably teaching a lifetime of experience with the older materials. The concurrent teaching/learning is understood to be seriously cool, certainly not shameful.

I set out to learn silver gelatin years ago, before there was any indication that the commercial products would start disappearing. I had just started back into that research when I saw Ron Mowrey's workshop at PF. (For an agnostic, I come embarrassingly close to believing in Kismet.) Mostly, I wanted to learn more about the coating blade. Long story shorter: The recipe Ron was using didn't work as well as some I'd experimented with. The 4x5 blade worked a h..l of lot better than anything I'd tried. When I combined some of his technique and his blade with my own twist, I ended up with a much better product than I would have "on my own". I've shared my refinements with Ron and he is having better luck, too. With his experience and knowledge base, I'm sure he'll take my small contribution to a level I never could. And so it goes.

So, I would add to the list of our "essential nature" a hunger to be simultaneously teacher and student.

[sanking]

Speaking more than one language is a powerful factor in being able to make a good photograph, and is far more important than owning, say, a densitometer.



...

I speak several languages other than English, and while the use of language has sometimes allowed me access to situations that others might be denied, I don't think that speaking several languages "per se" has been a powerful factor for me in making good photographs. In fact, I would say that appropriate use of the densitometer has been a much more useful tool.

When I think about the best photographs I have made it seems that most of them were made in conditions of silence, usually in the absence of other people, when all of my focus was on the purely visual experience.

Course, your use of the term "language" was probably more metaphorical than literal.


Sandy

[bob carnie]

Sandy
*it seems that most of them were made in conditions of silence*
We are at totally opposite ends of the spectrum here, As you know I use music to help me get into a *trance like * state when printing. The worst prints I make are when my neighbours tell me to turn down the music. When I start I will put on three hours of heavy rock, funk, soul,blues and get moving to the music and release myself from my surroundings and concentrate on the light passing through the negative onto the paper.

I speak several languages other than English, and while the use of language has sometimes allowed me access to situations that others might be denied, I don't think that speaking several languages "per se" has been a powerful factor for me in making good photographs. In fact, I would say that appropriate use of the densitometer has been a much more useful tool.

When I think about the best photographs I have made it seems that most of them were made in conditions of silence, usually in the absence of other people, when all of my focus was on the purely visual experience.

Course, your use of the term "language" was probably more metaphorical than literal.


Sandy

[David A. Goldfarb]

Speaking more than one language is a powerful factor in being able to make a good photograph, and is far more important than owning, say, a densitometer.

...

I think the sense in which this may be true is that the process of learning a foreign language requires a certain openness to the experience of others, a willingness to think in flexible ways, an acceptance of being an outsider in the target language, and the ability to observe the world as a foreigner and to be changed by that experience. Of course these skills are not exclusive to language learning, but I think that people who are good at languages are often good at these things, and they're not bad skills for a visual artist to have.

[SuzanneR]

I don't know, but it sounds like Sandy and Bob have both described multiple languages. Photography is a language, too, it seems to me... so I'm pretty fluent in English, a bit of German, and quite well versed in photographese!

I use all three languages to express ideas.

[bob carnie]

Suzanne
I didn't think I could learn a third language of sound, I am barely adapt in my second language of English, but my mothertonque of Moronica I am well versed.

I don't know, but it sounds like Sandy and Bob have both described multiple languages. Photography is a language, too, it seems to me... so I'm pretty fluent in English, a bit of German, and quite well versed in photographese!

I use all three languages to express ideas.

[jd callow]

I suspect that what Don is saying, or at least my take on it, is that it is helpful to know various ways to communicate if you wish to speak photographically or maybe it is that someone who can communicate in various mediums will be able to learn more quickly to communicate with film or that if you can communicate in different forms you will more readily be able to speak clearly and the power of photography will help to amplify your voice.