[UPDATE: P.S.—a P.S. before the fact, you might say—I'm actually thankful to Moose, who is a loyal reader and longtime commenter. It's true that I'm "scolding" him a bit here, but it was an opportunity for a teaching moment and it is useful in that way, and for that I'm grateful. I don't have any hard feelings, at all. Also, as many of us are, with my photographer hat on I admit I'm a little more thin-skinned than in my other roles, because the ego is a little more exposed. Plus, if he really objects to this post then I will take it down. —Mike, with editor hat on.]
Moose replies: "I certainly would not want this post taken down. So many words and links to images...I expect to provide a response, be it mea culpa or disagreement with the brickbats, most likely a combination. Nor have I had time and attention to absorb all the comments. I do relate to the first featured post, from Lothar Adler. The large number of lively comments do seem to indicate that the issue of photo presentation on the web is very much on many people's minds."
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Moose wrote, yesterday:
When I visit Mike's photos on Flickr, I wonder why they are almost all so flat, lifeless. Most recent two:
Sun After Rain [both on Moose's own site —Ed.]
(Click on images to see it big.)
I'm no Zone system maven, but I can see immediately that there is no true black and that tonal detail in middle and upper range are compressed.
Are we being treated like John Szarkowski, to unfinished work? Does web presentation not merit being finished? Let's face it, most people will see most photographs on their screens, not as a print. How do I want my work to be seen?
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There are three main reasons why this is unfair:
First, please don't mess with my work without my permission, especially if your purpose is to insult me. You didn't ask if that was all right. It's true that I've done "print critiques" here on the blog, but I explicitly ask people to send prints for critique, so they have implicitly granted their permission. If I want to comment on a person's work and change it to what I think looks better, I almost always ask them first (exceptions—I can think of one—were noted at the time). On principle, I almost never use negative examples; I don't hold up peoples' actual work for negative commentary without asking them if it's all right, even though I have the right under Fair Use to do so.
Second, for me, without question, the online JPEGs are not the work. I harped on this repeatedly in the early days of TOP, and don't do so as much any more; one reason for that is that now, sometimes the online JPEGs are the art—that is, that's how the creators of the images want and expect them to be seen. The other reason is that I can't keep repeating truths ad nauseam without becoming a bore. So if Moose bought prints of those images and wants to critique the prints, then I'll listen to his opinion, to an extent. Opinions about online JPEGs don't mean so much to me. The JPEG is just a representation, like a reproduction. We have explored over many years the difference between looking at little online JPEGs and comparing it to original work.
Thirdly, and more importantly: as I also keep saying, also at the risk of becoming a bore, you have to take mature artists at their word. That is, they mean their art to look a certain way, and that's their business, not yours. It's completely your right to decide whether you like it or not, whether you respond to it or not, and to express your response. However, in my opinion, you're making a mistake if you simply measure accomplished photographers according to the same yardstick you use to judge your own work, i.e., judge them by how well they conform to your taste in your own technique.
A few examples: Geoff Wittig and I went to the George Eastman Museum a few years ago to see the Alvin Langdon Coburn exhibit. Coburn's tastes were set in the high period of Pictorialism, and virtually all of his pictures are soft-focus, some extremely so, and have an extremely depressed tonal range—he essentially uses the bottom half of the Zone System range of numbered tones. It's meaningless to walk around such an exhibit and say, again and again, "there are no true whites in this picture!" and "his lens isn't sharp!"
Why? Because it's just a given of the work. He got the work to look the way he wanted it to look. The only way to truly see it is to look at it as if that were true. He's the one who gets to express his own intention, not me and not you.
In contrast, pun intended, some of today's B&W artists love the Structure and Clarity sliders and present work with extremely exaggerated local contrast along with hyper-sharpness. It's a look that was also favored by certain film photographers, for instance Charles Phillips, who made very large prints, designed to be viewed under very bright light, from 8x10 negatives using physical unsharp masks (that is, you really can't see Charles's pictures in little online JPEGs—Nick Hartmann, who saw Charles's presentation of his prints with me in my loft in Chicago, can attest to that). It's an artistic decision: unless you consider the art photographer to be a beginner or a student who simply doesn't know what he or she is doing yet, you need to assume that their work looks the way they want it to look, and judge it on that basis.
I could come up with a lot more examples, but just one more pair: take a look at some JPEGs of the work of Rodger Kingston. Now take a look at some JPEGs of the work of Bruce Haley. Both are accomplished, longtime photographers (and both are at least occasional TOP readers). Rodger likes color to be brilliant, rich, and saturated; this is becoming perhaps less distinctive now as popular taste moves more and more in that direction, but at some point in the not-so-distant past it was even more radical than it is now. Bruce, on the other hand, in his Home Fires I and II books, chooses very muted colors, so much so (in the books—the JPEGs at that link seem to me to present his colors a little bit boosted) that some of them are almost halfway to black-and-white. If you thought either person were a beginner or a student, you might criticize their choices to them. But they are not. The technique of their work looks the way it does because that's the way their work looks right to them, that's the way they want it to look, and that's what they intend. They're different photographers. They see differently. Take it or leave it.
This is not to say that friends can't influence each other: Carl Weese and I got together once in Washington, D.C.—he was shooting a kids soccer game on assignment, among other things—and we compared work. I vigorously defended the low contrast of my prints and he defended the high contrast of his prints just as vigorously...and then, months later, we discovered that we both had quietly modified our printing styles somewhat after our encounter: he had started using a little less contrast in his prints and I had started adding a little more contrast to mine. Unbeknownst to us at the time, each of us had successfully convinced the other to bend a little.
I can't personally say that I am 100% happy with the way my B&W work from the Sigma fp-M looks online yet. I'm still learning. I've pointed out failures (this shot) and asked for readers' help on others. But I am after a certain look because I like that look. I have my tastes, and what they are is up to me.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Lothar Adler: "When I read Moose's comment, I never for a second had the thought that he meant to offend you. I read his post solely from the perspective that he wanted to initiate a discussion about the relatively new problem of tonal design and impression of photographs in the age of constantly variable presentation by means of different media. Since nowadays in new photographic productions it is often no longer taken for granted that a material print must always be the relevant standard for tonal value design. Much more so, as different media behave very differently in terms of tonal value. It may be that the commenter Moose did not follow the usual sequence of permissions, but I was still surprised at how strict your response was in the first part. After all, we are among ourselves...and especially in your very cultured blog, we can assume that we are basically well-intentioned."
MikeR: "This post amused me, for the following reason: Some time ago my wife and I visited a museum (may have been the Art Institute of Chicago?) that had a small room dedicated to Stieglitz's 'Equivalents' series. I went from print to print, then back again. As we left that room, I commented to my wife, 'Stiegletz sucks.' Thinking about it later on, I did reconsider, along the lines of, 'Well, he liked it.'"
Mike replies: This comment made me wonder: are all photographers in all times insecure—even Stieglitz? It's at least possible.... :-)
Clay: "For what it's worth, I like your originals far better than the versions that Moose 'fixed.' That said, if they were my images, I would edit them very differently from either. [Carl said the same thing —MJ] It's like that tagline I heard in a commercial the other day: 'I said what I said.' It applies to photographs too. I think it always best to assume that an image that has been posted looks the way it is meant to look."
SteveW: "Thank you Mike and Moose. I think this one is essential reading, and I appreciate this very much. I struggle with what 'look' I'm striving for, and can go insane with post-processing to the degree I don't even want to take photographs. After reading today's blog I feel that there is a sense of liberation in being at peace with whatever look a person may favor. Don't ask me why I never considered this, lol. I'm an old dawg hobbyist, and it is blogs like today's that really make me appreciate TOP."
cecilia: "I hear your frustration, but I think Moose was completely fair. What is public is judged independent of intent. Full stop. This is hard reality. Sadly, when you anticipate judgement, or worse, cancellation, you can fall into extreme self editing. But I think you normally strike a great balance."
George Davis: "Wow! My favorite post in quite some time. While I agree that Moose should have sought permission before posting those comments and edits, I confess that I am glad that he did, for I see the Mike that drew me to TOP years ago. I wouldn't mind seeing a post where you begin to define your 'looks' and your tastes, not just what you like in your own work, but in others. Anyway, excellent post."
Terry Burnes: "We have a large Galen Rowell photograph in our living room, which my wife gave me as a present. I find it a near-perfect representation of the Eastern Sierra, where we live. It's hard for me to imagine someone not liking it. But when my photography buddy, the only friend with whom I share this interest, walked in and saw it, he immediately told me why he didn't like Rowell's work (overwrought, colors too intense, etc. etc., though this one isn't really that way). Yes, he's entitled to his opinion, but it seemed insensitive to me, to more or less insult a gift from my wife to me, an object which we both obviously like enough to buy and put on our wall in the most prominent position in the house. I think he just should have accepted it for what it is, and our choice to buy and display it. I think Rowell got what he wanted in that print. And so did we."
Mani Sitaraman: "I'm on team Mike on this, rather than team Moose (if there are, indeed, two teams in this matter.) I went to Moose's site, and when I moved the cursor over the pictures, everything suddenly seemed better, much closer to what I would want a black-and-white print to look like. I just assumed it was a quirk of the browser, and then I saw Moose's caption, which told me that the lower contrast version—Mike's original—would appear when the cursor was directly on the image. So much better. I dislike Moose's higher contrast versions, with (for example) the shoreline trees of Keuka Lake blocked up and near jet-black. I'm reminded of what I once read, which perhaps was written by Mike himself, in his online print days. Back in the heyday of the monochrome image, Henri Cartier-Bresson would always hound his printers at Picto, the renowned lab in Paris, to lessen the contrast in prints, to 'bring out the greys.' That's the aesthetic I prefer—silver tones in silver prints are just so pleasing. The aesthetic choice definitely carries over to digital, even as the technology of digital monochrome images pushes back against it and doesn't cooperate."
Sean: "The restraint you show in your photography is admirable and of a kind that is all too rare now. It takes time to make pictures look so effortless. I think those who like to turn things up to eleven do it rapidly and are flat-out wrong most of the time, and that's OK—when it's their pictures."
robert e: "I see the appeal of Moose's versions for hit-and-run viewing, but those are not images I would want to spend any time with. I would get a headache from trying—it's as if every element and detail is clamoring for attention, and there's little sense of harmony or balance across the image as a whole. It's like looking around Times Square or listening to 'exciting' audio speakers. Such experiences may be striking, scintillating, and immediately gratifying—enjoyable in their way—but over even a modest span of time they're exhausting and unfulfilling.
"I tried to think of a forests/trees analogy, or perhaps sweetness in food, but in the context of recent discussion here, what if the act of looking at pictures also falls under the 'process vs. project' dichotomy? There's the 'grok it and move on' school of looking and the 'sit with it and let it work on you' school of looking, and all the shadings and combinations between. Watch museum and gallery patrons for an illustration.
"I think the harsh reality underlying Moose's comment (and perhaps it was his intent merely to provoke this discussion) is that most web users habitually approach images with the 'project' mentality. Well, assuming this is true, and that one gives a damn, how much of the aesthetic of a given work are we supposed to compromise to 'hook' such a gaze, and then once we have it, how do we convert that to the process type of looking that that work is intended to reward? That to me is the fascinating issue here—I believe analogous to the problem of how to depict 3D art using 2D images, but more complicated because there isn't an obvious category mismatch. All I'm sure of is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution."