I’ve been working through the assignments in my online photographic seminar with Malaysian shutter-pro Ming Thein, covering topics like “filling the frame“, finding appropriate light, light metering, and aspect ratios.
And while I’ve been improving under Thein’s long-distance instruction, there’s still a vast, aching chasm of distance between where I want to be and where I presently am — though despite all the best instruction in the world, nobody else can drag me over that particular finish line. I’ll either get there on my own power or collapse in the trying.
Or, as commercial photographer and author Zack Arias bluntly states: “How to climb the mountain? Go up. Left foot. Right foot. Climb. Have fun. Don’t die!”
Climb. Have fun. Don’t die!
But the latest of Ming’s assignments has me flustered before I even begin, precisely because it’s arguably the weakest link in my personal photographic chain — “Natural Frames and Leading Lines” that serve to focus attention upon . . . the subject.
Dah dah daaaaaaaah!
In other words, he’s pointing me into the headwinds of composition, and composition is where I mostly fall to pieces. Yeah yeah, right, sure, I fall apart in the technical areas as well, I’ll be the first to admit that, but strong composition can offset technical failings; however, the inverse is not true. All the technical skill in the world *cannot* overcome weak composition, and even as my technical skills inch forward, I feel like I’m still twisting in the wind as far as composition is concerned.
Is attention-catching composition something that can be learned? Because otherwise I’m just another cog in the vast photographic wheel taking pretty, yet also mostly pretty unremarkable, pictures with a nice camera. And the world is already filled with that. If you don’t believe me, surf on over to top photography site 500px (I dare you) and lose yourself in the overwhelming, mind-numbing display of photographic gorgeousness that still somehow manages to fall completely and emotionally flat — you’ll see breathtaking waterfalls, stunning fiery sunsets, vibrant flowers courted by high-definition bees, birds frozen in dramatic mid-flight, glistening female models, shining mountain ranges, striking examples of glorious architecture, and oh god it’s all so lovely and perfect and just like a cannonball of barbiturates aimed right at the centre of my soul.
Can a blooming magnolia tree be anything more than pretty? Does that matter?
Which is not a slam of the photographers on 500px. They’re a mostly really talented group and I often page through the site and sigh over the sheer virtuosity on display, but after a while it all starts to blur together, like a conga line of perfectly sculpted Abercrombie & Fitch models who exist solely to sell you on their own personal party-boy charms. Yet with so many colourful pictures of birds and butterflies, smoothly flowing water, sunbathing wildlife and sexy leggy models, all that beauty initiates the bothersome question as to whether beauty alone is justification enough for all the hoopla.
Like the two photographs I embedded above — they’re lovely landscapes, but . . . okay, and?
It’s gotten to the point where even our fellow human beings are reduced to mere content fodder for the ever hungry maw of the Street Photography scene. Sometimes I’ll find myself planted in an outdoor space with nice light and photogenic surroundings, waiting for a random pedestrian to walk into the frame and “complete” the scene. As if somehow that random person I don’t know, that someone with zero emotional or intellectual connection to me or my work, has the power to elevate my snapshot into something meaningful and relatable to the world at large.
As if.
Is it a photograph of contrasts — large vs. small, man vs. manmade — or is it just a random stranger walking past a piece of public art?
And the more I see this kind of work, the less it moves me. But then, I probably spend an enormous amount of time looking at photographs online, plus in galleries and museum exhibitions, so maybe I’m burning myself out on the usually lovely and now require something that pushes the envelope just a bit more in order to find excitement in what I’m viewing.
The Peril of Continuous Creative Consumption 101.
But it’s when I see works by artists like the kind that exhibit with the McNamara gallery here in New Zealand that I become truly hopeful of the potential for contemporary photography (while also full of despair at my own vast distance from that far away shore, natch).
I checked out the McNamara display at the recent Auckland Art Fair, and was astonished at how deeply moving I found most of the photographs. As I walked through the fair, I’d been surrounded on all sides by stands, shelves and walls of bright, bold, corporate-tuned art that left me feeling cold and indifferent, but once I stepped into the understated McNamara space, I was suddenly, gratefully flooded with emotional response.
So I’m left wondering how I manage to traverse from the Abercrombie & Fitchness of 500px to the bracing shores of McNamara — how to travel from the suburban block of the merely lovely to that elusive, distant land of the insightful.
And I know I started off this post talking about the meaning of subject, but I guess my bigger question is — is beauty alone enough of a subject, enough of a meaning, for photography (or even art in general), or should I be striving for more? And if I should be striving for more, then what is that more, and how do I reach it?
Yeah, fine, I’ll tell you all how I discovered the answer to that when I deliver my Nobel Prize speech. Just give me a hundred years or so.
*UPDATE: Photographer Ken Rockwell provides a contentious (and controversial) counterpoint to the beauty vs. meaning blather: “The actual subject is meaningless . . . What that subject is or does consciously is irrelevant. As far as photographers are concerned, photo subjects are used purely as big colors and shapes . . . You are using every item in the image as a compositional element, exactly as you’d arrange pieces of cut-out construction paper to make an interesting composition.”
So, for him, it’s not even about meaning or *what* he’s taking a photograph of, only how light, shapes and colours interact within the frame. Admittedly, though, Rockwell has a reputation for sticking his thumb in the eye of everyone else’s precious opinions, so I’m not sure if he’s completely serious here or just trying to rile people up.
Maybe both?
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