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發表於 2013-8-22 15:54:20
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本帖最後由 Jason 於 2013-8-22 17:23 編輯
Please forgive me for writing in english. It's easier for me.
I think what vincecharus asked is a really good and important question. I have thought a lot about it, particularly when I studied photography almost professionally back then. Probably it is one of the most important questions about photography, in my view. To put it specifically -
What are the goals of photography? By what means to achieve such goals? And how to achieve such goals effectively?
I think the answers are very much personal, affected by particular needs or taste, or even social and economic conditions. I will try to list out what I have thought about and what I regard to be important.
1. Photography is about capturing the beautiful.
2. Photography is about capturing the real.
3. Photography is about capturing what has happened.
4. Photography is about capturing the feeling of the moment.
5. Photography is about creating "a moment" of the moment.
6. Photography is about pleasing the eyes of the other.
7. Photography is about creating a feeling of the other.
I think the first four points and #6 "pleasing the eyes of the other" are what we think about photography usually.
What is a good picture? In the most ordinary sense, a beautiful picture is a good picture. That's why we always like a picture with a young, beautiful woman in it. Why? Because it is simply beautiful. "Attractive", to put it this way.
But photography is different from other visual art forms, for example, painting, in a critical sense: We always assume photography is about the real. It lies deeply on the mechanism, as well as, the historical development of cameras. Photography always gives us an impression that it shows us "what has really happened". One can think of the images of security cameras (CCTV). The "realness" of photography is not only about the formalistic elements in the picture, such as facial expression, lighting, color, etc, but also about time and space. To twist Gertrude Stein a little bit, who once said "There is no there there" to signify the fleeting nature of time and space. A photograph proves "There happened there". This realness is very crucial regarding photo journalism. It is also the underlying principle of pictures like those of National Geographic, and of course, war photography of all sorts.
But these only give answers to those who take pictures professionally. To put it more bluntly, the aim of these photos only exist to please "the eyes of the other", no matter it is your friend, or a magazine editor, or the newspaper audience, or even the "imagined" historical eyes for, say, war photographs. The photograph's transcendental existence lies on some external, I would say metaphysical, principles, namely, Beauty and Truth.
For most of us, we don't take pictures for these. And honestly, even we do, these pictures are not the pictures we care most.
Imagine, if one day your house is on fire, you have five minutes the pack your stuffs to go. What pictures are you going to take? The 4x5 picture you took of a lotus last year which got you critical praise from Royal Photographic Society? Or the snapshot picture you took 10 years ago in your daughter first birthday party, in which your girl cried like a little monster?
I think we all know the answer. The real essence of photography is about emotion. The photos we care most are always the photos which capture the feeling of the moment - the feeling that we treasure a lot in the later days in our lives that "the moment" is no longer there. And that is the reason why professional photography, no matter how good it is, can NEVER be more important than personal photography. And that is also the idea, which I'm going to advocate here, that professional photography needs to learn from personal photography.
In fact, we started to see this trend in fashion photography in the past ten to twenty years. One quick example would be Terry Richardson. Let's put aside whether his images are vulgar (Of course, they are. But that is the whole point, isn't it?). We have to see the point he is making: he is blending personal photography and professional fashion photography. The real substance of his work is never about how beautiful the composition of the work is, but how everyday it is, how similar it is related to any moment in our lives.
If the key of photography is about capturing the moment, and thus capturing and reproducing its "emotion" (Look, "emotion" is the keyword here. This notion of emotion is also true for probably most successful war photography and photojournalism), we may push it even further to ask: Can we create such moment and such emotion?
All photographers should know that once you take out your camera, the dynamic changed. There is no invisible camera in any psychological sense. People act differently and even weirdly when a camera is there. That brings us two questions: If we take a camera to capture the moment, is THE moment real? What kinds of changes, affectively and dynamically, a camera make to the moment?
If all pictures are unreal in some sense, how can we treat photography as a piece of artwork, how can see it as a means of communication? I think, to me, the most important goal of photography is to provoke a feeling, an emotion. Whether it is beautiful, whether it is real, are not all that important. The smile may be fake, the composition may be wrong, but what important is: the feeling it provokes is real. That's why, Carla Bruni very intelligently pointed out, there is something honest about fashion photography.
It is just like the story of Emma Zunz: Even though the rape was false, the allegation was false, and the whole story was false, "but it impressed everyone because substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz' tone, true was her shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper names."
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發表於 2013-8-22 10:59:31
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