Synerdipity

So, how do notions of clean and clutter interact? I mean, minimalists believe that less is more,while that’s me up there in the title image, wondering if more is less?Huh?

Clutter’s the quarry of minimalists and me. We both want to shrink a story to its essence. Yet I do the opposite of whatever minimalists do. Is there a word for the opposite of minimalist?

The thesaurus cranks out synonyms for minimalism like; essential, austere, basic, conservative, moderate, spare, stark, or unadulterated. While its opposites are; embellished, ornate, lavish, and outlandish.

Giants of photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson hunted Decisive Moments: instants when life’s parts lined up into a meaning. They stalked frames of evidence. Like life: Cartier-Bresson’s stories are intricate yet straightforward. But even with their complexities it’s wrong to think of his images as embellished or outlandish. His parts epoxy together. 

Look here at Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard  Paris. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Rue Mouffetard, Paris – 1952

Last sold for $43,750

Here’s a sense of time, place, culture, and feeling. It’s a novel squashed onto one frame. Genius!

It’s the whole of a concept that makes a meaning. To paraphrase Antonio Salieri’s wonder over discovering Mozart’s hand-written scores in the movie Amadeus, “There are NO corrections, deletions or additions: None!  Add or remove a single note and the entire masterpiece implodes. It is as if he takes dictation from God!” 

So? Is Cartier-Bresson a minimalist?

I’m re-reading Michael Freeman’s Fifty Paths To Creative Photography, (IIlex Press 2016), and he’s triggered me to think that life and art are all about, lining things up – where to put stuff. Unlike other artists who could move things where they wanted, before digital it was photographers who had to move around. While it’s still a good idea, now we can move life's furniture in post. 

To photographic digital-artists, just as they are to many drawing-artists, what comes out of a camera are reference-images. Many of my artist friends take a series of photo-sketches… that they lug back to clip beside their easels. Some are facial or body expressions, some mood impressions, while many lack the lighting that ignites feelings. Most are simply snapshots of stuff – their photo sketchbook. But they contain the essence of theme for the artist to extract a narrative by realigning the pieces into an inclination greater than the sum of these parts. Which of course is the essence of conceptual art.

Serendipity happens when you find valuable or agreeable stuff you weren’t looking for. Synergy happens when the sum is greater than its parts.  Squoosh the two together and it makes me imagine what Synerdipity might mean. Isn’t synerdipity what the artist does? An artist wills things to relate. 

Once at a party I came upon a pair of literature professors wondering if one could think without words. Distractions happened and I never heard their conclusion – Damn! Perhaps they could have inserted “symbols” for “words” so that they wondered if thought had to involve the symbolic: and that thinking was a matter of sculpting an angel from a stone made up of symbols? Do y’gotta’ have a pile of tangibles to arrange into something intangible? 

For the moment let’s forget that our Latin/Greek based languages  (the only ones I know enough about to make sweeping statements) are all substantially metaphoric at heart. You know that abstract reasoning is also called conceptual reasoning. It’s an ability to problem-solve by identifying patterns, logic and trends from new data, then to focus conclusions. IQ is an attempt to measure degrees of insightful (or useful) intelligence while EQ is a similar attempt to measure the usefulness of an individual’s emotional tools. Great creators in every field are generally high IQ & EQ. They can CQ (Conceptual Quotient) at astonishing levels. 

And CQ is a tool of synerdipity. With or without words, artists reveal patterns. Now, let me digress for a moment. 

Regardless of the complexity of their challenge: mathematicians and engineers seek elegance. Which means they abhor clutter. So does an artist’s concept. In his frame of evidence for my conclusion look again at Bresson’s Rue Mouffetard. Think again about Solieri’s  startled reactions to Mozart’s scores. Both those scores and Carier-Bresson’s decisive moments are elegant in the mathematical and engineering sense. They can be condensed no farther. 

Their frames are bursting with meticulous meaning without any of the embellished, ornate, lavish, or outlandish which thesaurus-makers say are the antonyms for the word minimalism. They contain only the essential, austere, basic, conservative unadulterated pattern of whole concepts. And yet while we have a word for minimalists there is none for their opposite.

Here're three examples of photographic-based art which I could never have accomplished in a wet darkroom.

Here, look first at a 2007 shot I grabbed when a street carnival opened in a small Lancaster park.

Air Chairs • Buchanan Park, Lancaster, PA • May, 2007

The reference image showed a Ferris Wheel’s empty cages juxtaposed against flashing lights and a grey rain-stained sky. But the final image brought those lights and carriages together into a surreal feeling backlit by impossible heavens. 

Second in complexity here is a 2013 Dublin street capture – well actually two snaps. The first one was of street facades which, upon close inspection, showed lingering ravages of the real estate collapse of 2008. See how these are X-ray buildings? You can look right though them as most of their floors were empty. The second, which I placed in the foreground involved a mother and pram against a poster’ed wall. This second of the two suggested hope which was now both placed in front of, yet walled off from, both the immediate and distant past.  Again matching the dynamic (and depth of field) range of these two disparate photo-sketches into this seamless collage was a darkroom impossibility: Synerdipity.

In Sunshine or in Shadow • Dublin, Ireland • May, 2007

And finally, look here at “Time Ravages All Roses” 

Time Ravages All Roses • Geo-Collage • May, 2007

Yeah, the reference pix were stark. The coffined background was captured in a Dublin mausoleum, while the taxidermy monkey stood years earlier on an antique shop’s dusty shelf in Beaufort, South Carolina.  I found the back wall beneath an Amsterdam bridge. 

Complexity grows among these three images. “Air Chairs” involves one reference image, “In Sunshine or in Shadow” two, and “Time Ravages All Roses” a bundle of stuff. But just as “Rue Mouffetard, Paris” demands all of its component pieces to complete its narrative, so too do the three images that follow. None of the reference images stood alone. It is their juxtaposition which adds sufficient detail to tell their stories. 

Mathematical elegance does not require fewer equations, but rather the fewest components to prove a premise.  I suggest that minimalism in conceptual fine art photography demands sufficient pieces to convey a unity of both complex thoughts and feelings. Which means adding stuff until (but not beyond) the narrative’s need for clarity. Which means that in conceptual fine art, more is necessary until the point is made elegantly. See what I mean? CQ is the tool of synerdipity.

With respect to conceptual art, more is frequently essential to make a Spartan point. Which brings me back to the question… If conceptual fine artists are not minimalists, then what are they called? Why is there no word that defines the opposite of minimalist: A word that compacts elegance, and irreducible meaning? Have you ever noticed that until there’s a word for something, it doesn’t exist? Take say, the internet”. Or how about feminism, cartoons, or fusion cuisine? Did electricity exist before it was named? How about econometrics, existentialism, or porn? 

Perhaps synerdipity’s the word for that which is definitely not Spartan, austere, spare or stark, yet not outlandish, decorous, ornate, lavish, or outlandish. Is the frame of evidence opposite to minimalist that carries none of those pejorative overtones synerdipidist?

 Just wrestling with the synerdipity of art, y’know?

Racist?

Drive south along Interstate I95 and leave North Carolina. Within a quarter of a mile South of the Border appears on your left. It's a sprawling tourist trap filled with clip-joint shops, restaurants, a gas station, and assorted tourist attractions - including a large public toilet. It presents you with a battle between ticky and tacky, with tacky ahead by a nose.

The motif is sort of stereotypical Mexican... as imagined by people who don't seem to like Mexico all that much. Now I'm not a believer in the concept of La Raza. Most Latin Americans that I've met have as much European blood as me. However they are as ethnically different from my Irish ancestors as Serbo-Croatians. There is a Latin culture that's taken on unique national characteristics as you travel from nation to nation. What ties them together is Spanish.

However, ethnic cultures always seem to clash - and those clashes produce some hot sparks, even fires - right? Last week, a television news lady was fired from her network job on NBC for having a discussion which seemed to license black-face halloween costumes. Which brings me to South of the Border in South Carolina.

Here's that Pedro public toilet. So? Is "Pedro" not as ethnically insensitive as black-face costumes? The place has been around for decades -  perhaps half a century. Its designers probably consider the motif to be fun. Moreover it's thousands of miles away from the Mexican border. But... have definitions of humor changed drastically enough over the last couple of decades to pop the place's humor balloon? Is South  of the Border a racist (or at least an ethnic) dog-whistle?

Pacem In Terra

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And away they all flew
Like the down of a thistle...

But I heard him exclaim
Ere he drove out of sight,

"Merry Christmas to all,.
And to all A GOOD NIGHT."

We're at a moment of worry with respect to things economic, with a real possibility that a gale of creative destruction will whip through our places in 2011. We face a moment of challenge which this time I hope will see, as that gale recedes.... Pacem In Terra.

Which is truly the hope we have been waiting for.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Ted

Do You Know When It's Done?

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Gotta' admit that I always envied the guys in my high school class who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. You'll remember the ones who were going to be doctors, lawyers, painters, engineer... like that. Frankly there was no one back then who said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be an economist and edit business magazines, and write." Nope, nobody. So I've had to figure it out, and well, I'm still not certain what, when I grow up, I'm going to be.

Maybe that's why I've got a problem as an artist in deciding when an image is done. I mean, when it's grown up and become what it should be...could be... will be....

Take Deadfinger here. I knew the title when I used my G10 to capture this thing poking way up into the clouds. And I knew that it spoke to me about tickling the heavens, and filling upper spaces, and attracting attention to itself from the crowds all around Madison Square Garden. And there was something about hubris too in the moment, along with ambition, and daring. And of course, something about the ambition of New York in the early parts of the last century. All that was there.But...as the feelings emerged on my palette...COMMUNICATE.... But... but...

The thing is that there are so many ways to say something. And so many things that something can say. And... and... How to know when that something's sufficiently mature and full-bodied and... and... CLEAR?

Yeah... all art comes swathed in ambiguity... but every artist has something which s/he hopes that the visitor will experience. And since all artists are control freaks (it's part of the job description... go look), then we need to dissipate some of the ambiguity... to poke some holes into it so that it will Hisssssssss away leaving shapes, forms, textures, and palettes (just about all we have to compose with) that communicate.


How do we know we've done that? How do we know that we've moved a feeling efficiently enough to move the viewer toward our feeling? Resonated it authentically? How... How... HOW???

See... see how Darkfinger morphed from that first image to this second one? And can you imagine the steps between? And the ones still to come? And if you do imagine them... is that alone what I needed to do? Cause you to wonder? For, art without wonder is... is... merely craft. Right?

Flowers Are Boooring?

SIMPLY PRETTY

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The thing about flowers is that… Well you know what a “gimmee” is in golf? They are given free to us as artists. They are so beautiful… almost achingly so, that it is as if we are cheating by making images of them. They are both simple and pretty… “Simply Pretty”.

And they are so difficult at the same time. I have a similar problem with gorgeous people. Their very perfection leaves me so little artistic room to maneuver. How do I add anything to the stunning presence of those flowers up above? What is left for my artistic muse? I become a reproducer… a copier…. a…a… a… plagiarist.

If I took something like that in my day job… and reproduced it in an article… I’d get sued for appropriating the idea/work of someone else. And yet… yet…

Haven’t you noticed that there are things which are like magnets to our lenses? Trains pull at our cameras along with sun sets/rises, children… and… and.. FLOWERS!

So of course I can’t help myself. But when they are done… and the image sits there smiling back… So simple… so pretty… So Simply Pretty… I want to share it, but not take credit for it. Because what I see there is something for which I have very little credit. What I see there is awesome, moving, and some higher source’s gimmee.

BTW, there are artists who can express their personal wonder through their floral still lifes. I think of April Siegfried's stunning studio studies. Hers are NOT merely slavish reproductions. Not boooooring. See, it's not so much flowers that I find booooring. Or images of them... It is the fact that I lack the imagination to do more than reproduce nature's gimmee.

Sigh…

WHY THIS BLOG IS A MESS!

It's said that Steve Jobs has a life view that goes, "I'll like you until I don't." And as Adobe knows, it is not good to have Steve fall out of like with you.

Well, sometimes, and they aren't often, I find my like for Apple is not unconditional.

This blog is a mess right now. If you scroll backward you will quickly notice that hundreds of postings are now missing. Why? I subscribed to a .Mac and for my money received a website service. You can find what is left of it by CLICKING HERE!

And you will see that you can page through scores of empty URLs. All of the graphics have been trashed by Apple!

Yes, they warned me that they would no longer allow postings to that site when they arbitrarily notified users that they were ending the service. BUT... they also wrote that posted graphics would remain. And then after about a year of supporting those postings, WUMP! They dumped all of the graphics.

And mostly all of the postings on this blogspot prior to a few months ago were linked from those postings on hompage.mac.com/byrneprintmaker. And without those links, all of those graphics here on ImageFiction, were extinguished.

Do I have backups? Sure. But... to replace the broken links, I shall have to tediously go to each of the previous postings, figure out what the linked graphics were named, Find them among my old files. And then reload them... one at a time. It will take countless hours.

I'll try slowly to replace some of my favorites, but I fear that visitors to this blog will not graze page, after back page, to find the few that I repost. Nope, unless I do them all, or develop some alternative system... all of that work is gone with the Apple.

And so, in spite of the many things that Apple has done to make me like them... I am falling out of like. Sigh.....

And I guess the moral here is, if you can't trust Apple to protect a service that they charge you for... How much faith should you put in any of the "cloud" services which promise to store your valuable backups?

To see what I've fixed look at the ROTTEN APPLE - REPAIRED POSTS FROM THE PAST link on the right hand column. I will try to slowly add my favorites over there.

Whoa! EarthMonster!!!

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WOW! Some weeks are reeeeely unforgettable. A couple of days ago I told you about AlienSkin's featuring my work. BUT.. BUT... BUT... This is infinitely HUGE.... . I have just learned that the increasingly influential EarthMonster Illustrated has named ME the featured artist for June! Click here if you don't believe me. YIPES!!!! Look at the artists they have discovered on that elegant monthly E-Zine and they've added ME!

YIPPPIE!!!!

(Slap!) Um, thanks, I needed that.

Okay, I've stopped panting an I'm calming down and I'm chanting my mantra and my heart's slowing nicely...

If you are not a regular visitor to EarthMonster Illustrated, you're missing something cool. Some of you noticed it first when I recently added it to the bar on the right under: PHOTOGRAPHIC COMMUNITIES/FORUMS. Well for those who didn't, I hope that you'll drop on by and thank Mark for his labor-of-love in assembling such a wonderful site for us, AND for hunting out all of the featured thoughts and people on that column on the right of his site. And of course I hope that you'll scroll down his page and enjoy the artists he's featured before me in previous editions of EarthMonster Illustrated.

Did I say...

YIPPPIE!!!!

New Link Under Ted's Essays!

Lookit! Yippee, Vonne from The Fine Arts Composite Group at the explosively popular RedBubble forums interviewed ME! And she probed into my photo/art influences, what triggers and maintains my inspiration, what I want to get across artistically, the hardest obstacles, my plans, and my advice to the novice.

I'm psyched. If you've wondered about any of that stuff that I wonder about... just click on the link under "Ted's Essays" in the right hand column and enjoy... and gimme your reactions here... K? That'd be reeeeeely cool and visitors will get a chance to react to your reactions and on and on... Kew-el!

What's The Story With Flowers?

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Have they anything to offer but beauty? Must you justify them because of their prettiness? They share a force with babies, puppies, and kittens which squeezes an, “Awwww!” out of us. Now I can understand our hard wiring to young mammals, evolution’s hooked that up for obvious reasons. But why to flowers? What primal instinct is served by us feeling so much from blossoms?

They rarely signal the presence of food. Nor water. They’re lousy shelter. They’re never warm in the cold, hell, they’re not around then. And since the most colorful thrive on direct sunlight, they don’t advertise relief from heat. So if it’s not survival or sustenance, what’s the deal?

Let’s go back to the baby thing. We’re drawn to the big eyes and helpless movements in an instinct to hold and protect. And their memories certainty are one motivation for procreation. Hmmmm…. Are flowers wrapped up in our protective or procreative instincts? Certainly Georgia O’Keefe discovered Freudian metaphors in blooms for – well you know where I’m going… Or where she went.

Oddly though, flowers seem to appeal even more strongly to women than to men. Perhaps it’s cultural, but in most societies, aren’t flowers a coveted gift by men to women? I suspect there is some gender correlation to the intensity of their appeal.

Regardless, I have taken flower pictures, hasn’t everyone? And each time that I do, the best of the shoot seem to resonate among the better images I’ve captured. Until I wonder about them. Yes there are all the classical elements of texture, form, shape, and palette. And they can be easily framed in any of the most powerful compositions.

But once you’ve done that, what have you captured? April has found ways to speak eloquently through her flowers. I cannot find that voice. But what do I get? A pretty flower picture, like the ones that come with new picture frames. Beauty does not resonate, it merely attracts. We use it up quickly - it is monotonous.

Perhaps the problem with pictures of blooms is that they do not die. They do not wiggle, sway, or glottal together to create new patterns. Perhaps it is the persistence of photos which may distill out the beauty of the original flower, but not its impermanence . Perhaps it’s the fragility that they share with babies, puppies, and kittens that make the real things more interesting than their photo representations?

I want an image to bring me beyond itself. I cannot find those stories in my flower pictures. Nor can I find the feelings that are larger than the blossoms. Which probably leads to my disappointment with my images since I can’t seem to visually answer the question: What’s the story with flowers?

The Professional's Challenge

THE TRACTOR BEAM OF COMMODITY PRICING


NOTE: Inspired by a note on the terrific http://prophotolife.com/, I was moved to expand this essay from a comment I posted on Jim Talkington's blogzine.

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At an early career turning point I had the choice of following the road marked “Professional Photographer.” Didn’t because it simply looked too steep, twisty, and poorly marked. Put simply, it seemed too damned hard. So for fifty years I’ve picked the low hanging fruit that amateurs get to pluck. And they have been sweet. Photography’s given me consolation, perspective, and an alternative outlet for my passions, ideas, and emotions.

But while I don’t regret my choice, I do admire just how hard successful commercial photographers in every one of the fields work for their living. Yes there are more competitors than ever. And yes technical competency is coming at a younger age when those youngsters lack family responsibilities and are stoked with an enthusiasm to work a hundred hours on projects that only pay for ten. The young wolves have always challenged the pack leaders - but it does seem as if they are coming on in larger hoards, each anxious to work for a Happy Meal at MacD’s with enough left over to buy a new lens. Subsidized by parents, they have little sense of overhead, depreciation, or profits … But many seem fixed with the edgy eye that editors, art directors, designers, brides, and gallery owners find the passion du jour.

And since they share the generational culture that buyers want to attract/distract - what they lack in capital equipment can frequently be overwhelmed by a cultural vocabulary. It’s useful to speak in the voice and language of your market.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a generational divide in the tastes of those who pull the trigger on purchases. A generation of young buyers who have been raised within a thick-walled paradigm which reflects back their self worth at ever angle… is hard for folks to crack when they are standing outside of that generational bubble.

But… all is not grim for the professional who can escape the tractor beam of the commodity force which seems to pull prices down as equipment, overhead, and life costs soar. Never before has marketing literacy been so important to commercial photographers. If price is the opiate of the new photographer, brand is its cure.

How many community photographers, for example, are Rotary members? Lions? Sertoma? Elks? How many have joined the Chambers of Commerce? How many attend every mixer and small business meeting? How many volunteer for arts organizations? For non-profits? How many have donations in every charity fund raising auction? How many hang out at the local coffee shops in the early AM where everyone knows your name? How many warm calls do you make a week? How many cards do you hand out daily? Where? I can think of a half dozen guerilla marketing techniques that are invaluable to advertising but cost nothing except sweat equity. How many do you know? Have you ever heard of guerilla marketing? Punk marketing? Why not?

How do you use free media? What is it? If you don't know, you are NOT a professional. And now I'm not just thinking of the community professional. Speaking of professional - what professional meetings do you attend? Are most of them, or all of them in your profession? WRONG! You will meet very few buyers at a seminar on "The New Wedding Techniques," or - "Follow Focus For Sports Photographers." Simple question, are you building technique or market with your spare time? What is your balance? What must it be to survive?

Have you Googled brand building? Read any books? Does the whole thing make your eyes glaze? Then you either need to find a job working for someone who has clear eyes, or sell the cameras to pay for those accounting, economic, and science credits you should have taken to get you into another career.

To the degree that the commercial photographer has been engaged over his/her years in building brand and product differentiation: To the degree that it’s been reinforced with strategic networking techniques: Then this appears to be a very good time to be a pro.

Although I still won’t swap my amateur standing with any of you.

Finding The Voice Of Your Instincts • An Essay

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With art, the idea is to look through the image to the meaning on the other side. Okay, so how do you do that kind of photographic based image? There are a cornucopia of digital enhancements available to us which make the creative process more exciting. But first, some words about processing.

All pictures are processed: life is too.

Image makers debate the role of enhancement, meaning processing. Yet every film ever made along with every digital processor… all of them process images. If the film photographer is very pure it’s possible to restrict the processing to “just” the stuff that’s done by the engineers who dreamt up a film’s chemical composition, plus the purest chemical mix needed to develop and preserve the paper image. But even this most restricted effort is still processing and there are a colossal number of wet-darkroom diddles that can take things way farther between opening the film canister and showing a print.

There's an organic photographic school that hates digital post processing since that movement grows out of a nostalgia for film photography. When it comes to photography, they want all engineering to end at say… 1988? Which is peculiar since there’s a lot more processing going on twixt lens and virgin image in the film world than in the digital.

Photography has always been an adventure.

And fine art photography explores the space inside of us just as surely as our lenses aim at the outside world. The digital photographic process allow us to explore deeper than film ever did.

They allow us to find the voice of our instincts.

Look, as I’ve written in an earlier essay, pre-processing has always gone on. We choose a lens, camera format, point of view, depth of field, blur, filter, lighting, even set, makeup and model. Is that manipulation? Nope… enhancement.

I’ve already discussed the post processing extremes of the film development chain. And now there are the tools of digital post processing.

An artist creates a pane out of a plane.

We make images on a two dimensional surface yet behind it lies more dimensions than Paris Hilton has shoes. The artistic moment occurs when the image plane that attracted us begins to shimmer and reveal, like a pane of glass, the artist’s ideas, answers, hopes, fantasies, dreams, questions, opinions and feelings.

But before we can do that we have to seek out all of those things ourselves. Then reveal them to first us, then to others as eloquently as our craft (technical & aesthetic) will permit. The viewer and the artist take a plane ride… through that pane… into…

Ultimately intelligence is the master processor of art.

But it is a two part thing. What lurks behind the plane is first what the artist has found inside of his or her self… and secondly what the viewer makes of what the artist has revealed. Art is a process of connecting beliefs and understandings in ways that resonate with meaning. Look, we all live in a bubble with walls created from our morality, ethics, tastes, education, loves, politics, hates, and DNA mix. We live in cultures, and simultaneously build our own inside of the larger ones. Our bubble walls are transparent, but colored and foggy so that the things that come through are shaped to our beliefs.

We are conclusions seeking confirmation.

Still, even though those walls constrain us, there are folks who’d want to impose rules that keep us from fully understanding even our own bubble-space. They create rules which hobble our ability to express ourselves.

There are two kinds of rules.

(1) Some rules are tools.
(2) Some rules are barriers.

Know the difference.

For example, drop a banana and it plops to the floor. That’s an example of rule (1)…. Gravity. If we understand gravity we can use it to do things, imagine things, grow. But suppose someone insists that (2) because of gravity we should never show floating bananas. That’s a barrier.

Organic photographers insist that photographic images should pass the reality test. The final image should not contradict any known principles of behavior. All shadows must have balancing light sources, colors must come from nature, things must be as they “could” and “should” be found.

Artists employ the (1)-rules to deconstruct the (2)-rules. Which can be disturbing. There is no (1)-rule which says that the conjectures and assertions beyond the image pane need not disturb.

Post processing enhancements now allow us to peer at the virgin image on a monitor, study it, and then find a way to poke through it. Good images are at least semi transparent. Great images are more like the clearest crystal. They are tickets to a pane ride into both the imaginations of the artist and the viewer.

Okay, so are there principles for employing the full range of pre and post processing enhancements to turn the film plane into a pane? I think so, and I'll discuss them in my next essay.


Ultimately they leave us wondering. And wonder is a very good thing.


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Here's the virgin image from up top...

"Wow"? • An Essay

What Do We Do After We Go “Wow”? • An Essay
The purpose of beauty in art photography
By Ted Byrne

I suspect that somewhere deep down in our reptilian brains – beauty has a utility. Someone once wrote that we use pornography up. If we didn’t, he asserted, there’d be no reason to publish more than one issue of Playboy.

Pornography apparently is linked to a primal drive to procreate.

Artists have been on an ageless quest to distill out the essential beauty in the human form – male and female. The girls do get prettier at closing time. Lady ‘cougars’ are on the prowl for stud-hunks.

And yet, that beauty that teases, entrances, seduces… loses its magic in the post-coital hangover. Regardless, all of us hunt for that initial burst of beauty which will cause us to tumble into the bubbling stew of love.

I wonder about this tendency to use beauty up. To seize it, then dispose of it. We seem drawn to to perpetuate the species…What Captain Picard called, “The Prime Directive’.

Art Historian and art photographer Jeff Curto in a compelling podcast questioned the artistic appeal of Alec Soth and Derek Henderson. And Curto wondered how it is that we are attracted to images that are not beautiful and which have even pushed beautiful images out of fashion.

Beauty snares us into deeper things. Marketers know that so they have surgically separated beauty from its evolutionary purposes in order to push washing machines or flat screen TVs. They tease in order to sell… but there’s a disconnect between packaging and product that we sense and which eventually leads us to distrust the tease: Distrust the beauty. To become at best skeptical about anything that is ‘merely’ beautiful. Anything that is no longer connected to the function we are hard wired to expect it to deliver.

And as people wear y of the way beauty’s triggers are exploited I wonder:

- Will we grow increasingly frustrated as stimuli arouse us but fail to lead to consummation of any sort?
- If beauty is a foreplay for some other matters, will we begin to reject it unless it is offered up in ever escalating doses?
- Will we increasingly yearn for a functional beauty which allows us to enter into a world of ideas, thoughts, or answers as their payoff.

Simply put: Is beauty enough? What do we do after we go, “Wow”?

Beauty, along with shock, humor, farce, pathos, drama, surrealism, awe, romance, narration, satire, and others are tools found in the photographic artist’s tool kit. They’re devices that inform a body of work… a life view. The danger comes when we confuse the tools for art. Their mastery in isolation is at best craft.

One way of determining a craftsperson’s worth is in the market. Dollars are numbers on a scorecard. “Wow” sells better than anything. Because in the commercial world we want to trigger viewers to action. It is the tease which makes a frequently unrelated message accessible by pointing it out to the viewer. “Wow” is not something that is bought for its own message – people who buy “Wow” want to exploit it to sell theirs. Commercial markets demand that the craftsperson separate the tease from its meaning.

Many of us confuse market success with art. We define art’s importance with its price tag. In many ways the photographic artist faces the same problem as the poet..

Just like poets those who work in the field of photographic art face much smaller numbers of potential buyers. Here, some of the most successful artists financially are also the best artistically but there’s no natural link in a system where very few artists are involved in the decision concerning who and what sells. Commercially successful art photography must first filter through the tastes of: gallery owners, curators, art historians, academics, agents, marketers, collectors, publishers, critics, and many more. Can anyone imagine Warhol’s ‘artistic’success absent the white wig and a circus of transvestites?

As I’ve said, beauty is one of the photographic artist’s tools. Beauty used exclusively as one note - results in a body of work which can bore. Only a great master, like say Ansel Adams, can continually mate it with awe to cause us to reconsider the significance of our role in the universe. His work deals more with humility than scenics. And that’s the point, an artist pulls you back to confront questions beyond the “Wow”.

We categorize photographers two ways: by genre (wedding, fashion, sports, nature, street, journalism, art… etc) and by dominant tools (beauty, shock, humor… Etc.). But we characterize the artist by depth of message. Tools like beauty can leave both the viewer and the photographer marooned at the “Wow”. Imagine if a playwright, novelist, or poet was limited to all good, or all evil. Imagine one limited to the one note of shock, menace, or beauty. There would never be a story arc, no narrative would occur. Their work might sell for a time, but would quickly languish. Who remembers for example, any of these astonishingly successful formerly household-names as artists: Dean Cornwell, Violette Oakley, Walter Biggs, Réne Bouché, Robert Peak, Lorraine Fox, Heysa McMein, or Dorothy Hood? Yet they made astonishing money for their art that was seem on a regular basis in the first half of the last century by hundreds of millions.

The torrent of beautiful images now available has led me to filter out those which I cannot look through as well as look at. I am searching for the portal to ideas or conclusions. Whether the window artists create leads me to ponder the human condition, the meaning of life, or the way we can alleviate hunger, or simply make happiness grow… Whether the consummation on the other side of an image is playful or fundamental, I value those images which lead me into a place which develops my thoughts or feelings something that Soth and Henderson are doing. I want beauty to bridge to a conclusion. And if the conclusion is veiled by ambiguity, that’s fine as well. Ambiguity engages me, causes me to ponder alternatives, a process which is satisfying by itself. Beauty is one element of accessibility… perhaps the most enthralling.

Too many photographer s of great craft also look to peel the “Wow” from its utility. We are drawn today to trivial image-making where “Wow” is the end rather than the means. Craft is a useful but insufficient condition for art, so is beauty. A work of craft or beauty will satisfy me once. A work of art will nurture me each time I return to ponder, and its power to bring me back is precisely the measure of its importance. Alone, beauty is cerebral/emotional junk food – taste without nutrition.

Because I suspect that somewhere deep down in our reptilian brains – beauty has a utility.

Early Sunday Morning

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Of course in this image I'm influenced by Edward Hopper. Has anyone who has seen his paintings not influenced by him? He's like that tune you can't stop whistling. His color palettes and drawing techniques are so American. It's amazing to me that Hopper came along so early in the last century and yet still influences designers of the hottest cutting edge films.

Hopper’s most cherished paintings are seventy to ninety years old now and his oils have darkened, lending a brooding mood to what were probably much lighter statements. I thought about cranking down the vibrancy of Early Sunday Morning over Lancaster but wondered whether I’d be influenced by Hopper or by what’s come to be considered Hopper as his messages to us pass through time.

Look at this darker take on Early Sunday Morning. I’ve incorporated what Hopper’s critics now call his poem to urban American drabness. They say that this darkened palette captures suspended moments of great pessimistic clarity even as a new day dawns. Maybe, or maybe he bought a box of oils that lacked archival permanence.

Suppose I’m right. Suppose that Hopper painted in the vivacious hues of the image I’ve led with up above. So what are we to think of his ideas today? Or are they his ideas? If it is your intention to build a grand three story building and long after your death a quake levels it to a cute one story structure… Can we judge your intent from what’s left?

And doesn’t the same thing happen when the image stays exactly the same as you intended and culture changes over the years? When different eyes and minds interpret your image, are the ideas and feelings that are communicated yours?

Yeah, I’m influenced by Edward Hopper’s paintings. But, I wonder how much I’m influenced by what forty-something Edward Hopper set out to communicate seventy five years ago? And I wonder if future generations visit my work, or yours, how much that we intend our images to carry to them will have faded in the overlay of their beliefs?

Which leads me to a question: At the moment you release a work into the wild, do you retain any control over its meaning? Is any other meaning as valid as yours? I think that what comes through a time tunnel is what the people on the other side want to come through. And it is quite possible that relatively little, if any of your intentions will withstand the scrubbing of time.

When To Sign A Photograph?• An Essay

The last time I was in Rome…. Gosh that’s a cool sentence, it rings like a fork against fine crystal. “Twinnnnnnggggg!” But anyway, the last time I was in Rome we, like every other Roman tourist who ever lived, we visited St. Peter’s Bascilica at the Vatican.

And like every one of them, I took pictures. Here’s one, which I haven’t - and won't - sign.

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Why is that? Because this image was actually taken by the engineers at Canon Industries. What I brought to this image was their EOS 20D camera and a standard zoom lens. What I contributed was a lifetime of work that let me save enough money to take the Canon stuff and myself from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to a spot in the middle of the massive stone square in front of the Cathedral.

Photographers have wrestled over four things that a camera can do. They anguish over whether an image they “take” is objective or subjective. And they sweat over whether it demonstrates or illustrates.

Say what?

Lemme ‘splain by example. This picture I’ve shown you demonstrates what this view of St. Peter’s looked like on a mid, very sunny, October day. Except for earning the ticket and the camera paraphernalia, my only contribution was to point and click. And what I took was what people all around me were taking. It is an objective demonstration of what you would have seen if you stood there at that time. Get it? Objective (there is little if any of “me” in the picture I took) so while it demonstrates exactly what was in front of me, it fails to illustrate anything about the thoughts or feelings it invoked. I bring nothing to this.

Canon ‘took’ this picture; I did not ‘make’ it.

For me to sign it would be actually vulgar. Who am I to claim any credit for St. Peter’s Basilica? What I brought to this photograph was the mindless craft imbedded in a Canon camera and its lens. Now, I am not dumping upon craft, merely recognizing if for what it is in photography. For me to claim any sort of ownership for this image would be as if I opened up Shakespeare, photocopied a bunch of lines, and then grabbed credit for them. Just as that is the act of plagiarizing someone else’s ideas, claiming credit for a found image is also plagiarizing. And it doesn't matter if you are slavishly copying Renaissance architects or artists, or in some other case plagiarizing nature by displaying an un-processed snapshot of a sunset.

Notice I wrote, “un-processed.”

Artists process. They bring their ideas and feelings to the making of a photographic image. The picture they make, as opposed to pictures snap-shooters take, is a subjective illustration of them. And processing can happen before, during, and after a photograph is taken. Processing demands some intellectual intervention.

But let’s go back to the last time I was in Rome… “Twinnnnnnggggg!”

My first thought was to convey a sense of place: to communicate the classical grandeur and mass of this space in front of the seat of Catholicism. How to say, “Holy Basilica, Batman! This place is HUGE, OLD, and RICH!”

So I did this.

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See, here’s a triptych which taken together as a totality conveys through details what I couldn’t do in a single vista. Why couldn’t I? There were a zillion people all around me that seemed to be that many distractions from this place. Now they also could have been the subjects of a different idea, but it wasn’t the one that overwhelmed me. Plus the mid-day light is a photographer’s nightmare searing contrasts across marble, which no camera can hold throughout the tonal range. I also dealt with them by my points of view and processing.

Traditionally photography was governed by technical standards that made genuine achievement hard to accomplish. Unlike a poet or painter, I have a machine between my ideas and the thing I have ideas about. That machine’s the creature of strict engineering principles. Until the birth of digital enhancement, every action I took to offset one of the machine’s limitations, every one of those things (lenses, filters, formats, chemicals, papers, lighting, makeup, costuming, whatever…) resulted in corresponding intrusions upon the final result. Everything a photographer did to ‘make’ an image was a work-around that left its own shadow.

Great photographers came to master those enhancements in both pre-processing (getting the right equipment to the scene) and post-processing (usually in the darkroom, but sometimes later with razors and hand applied coloring… like that).

My triptych is essentially quite traditional. Through the careful selection of viewpoint, lens, aperture, speed, polarizing filter, and some digital darkroom enhancements I selected three full-frame images that together communicate my awe at the size, age, and wealth of this place. Together they form a subjective (my own) illustration of how St. Peter’s front stoop impressed me. That’s what I’m telling you with this trio. Hence it is no longer vulgar to sign it, indeed while I have difficulty signing any of the parts individually (for the same reasons I wouldn’t sign the first image I posted up there) the trio of parts is my statement, not Shakespeare’s not a Renaissance architect’s… Mine. Ted Byrne’s.

When an image conveys subjective ideas to illustrate a feeling or an idea (or both) it transcends craft… Goes beyond it. That’s art baby (um, whether it’s good art is never the artist’s call). There are still photographers who cannot believe that what they do in an instant can possibly be art. After all, how long did it take Michelangelo to release David from that block of marble?

Art isn’t measured in time put in. If it were then all you’d need to judge its existence would be a stopwatch, clock, or calendar. Many photographers seem to feel that art making is something pretentious. No, they argue that they aren't doing art at all, merely finding, recording, observing, witnessing, or measuring. And photographs can do all of those things in science, in court, and even on occasion in photojournalism. And they can do them better than any other representational craft.

But they can also illustrate ideas and feelings. Photographs can be as fictional as the works of Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, or Ingmar Bergman. In fact, Bergman used cameras exclusively to tell his feelings. No one objects to any of those doers of fiction signing their work.

In photography the subject always bleeds through. And when the subject matter seems to dominate the subtlety of the artist's layering of emotion or thought – it seems pretentious to find a signature on the photo, right? The subtler-seeming the photographer’s enhancements, the more likely the viewer is to mistake an image for an objective, point-and-shoot representation rather than a deeply personal subjective illustration of the meaning which the artist conveys. The fewer seams that show as a result of stunningly hard work the less likely the photographer is to get credit for the artiness of the work. Odd, I can think of no other area where that kind of rule applies.

Imagine if the smile on the prima ballerina were taken to indicate that her art were effortless and therefore banal. Imagine if the virtuosity of a violinist or the technique of a sculptor led people to conclude that they were incapable of communicating feeling, or thought!

So, do we stop here? Can a photographer only make signing-worthy photographs when they are in groups like my triptych? If that were so, then the only photographic artists would be some sort of time-lapse cinematographers. Which brings me to this image.

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Once again, I stood out there in front of St. Peter’s at the same time I both took the first image and when I made the triptych's pieces (notice the “took” versus “made”). But this time I wanted in one frame to create a piece of illustrative art. I wanted you to understand something about me, and how I began to look at St. Peter’s. I wanted to convey the rich color of medieval pomp. The contrast between the softness of flowing time (water) and the solidity of wealth (the immutable structures). I wanted your imagination to embrace one idea, “opulence” in contrast to another “piety”. And I wanted you to wonder if the two might really co-exist or if they were mutually exclusive. And if so, at this place… which one won?

And I wanted to capture your attention with technique, palette, and strict composition. But most importantly I wanted to create … to make… an image you could look through to find these ideas and feelings.

Now, it is quite arguable whether I succeeded. But it is not arguable that the final image is one that is unique to my mind at that time. It is a subjective illustration of the way my mind wrestled with those things. I did not plagiarize Shakespeare or that Renaissance architect with a click of my shutter. Canon did not take this image, I made it.

Which means I can sign it as proudly as any artist signs his work.

From their first years photographers wrestled with a feeling of artistic inferiority which painters in particular were happy to reinforce. One would think that photography’s claim to art making had been settled long ago. Yet I believe it’s a lingering sense of insufficiency which leads photographers to the conclusion that signing their work is either vain or coarse.

It is the making of photographs into illustrative art which proves that photographers have the same license to brand their creation as any other artist. Which explains why I sign most of the images I post here, including this third image I built from the last time I was in Rome… “Twinnnnnnggggg!”