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Sow's ear syndrome |
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Immense effort and money has been poured into beautifully subtle or impactfully bludgeoning images to persuade us to buy. Billions of such images. Billions of dollars. Yet they are transitory. The still images that live in deep memory are remarkably mostly monochrome. Naked children fleeing napalm in Vietnam. Frederick Evans' sea of steps at Wells cathedral. Don McCullin's battle-shocked, blank-staring marine in Vietnam. Cartier-Bresson's smiling boy with big bottles of wine on each arm. Ansel Adams' Moonrise over Hernandez or Moon over Half Dome. US Marines erect the flag over Iwo Jima. Dorothy Lange's dustbowl America. Edward Weston's erotic peppers. Lartigue's leaning car wheels. Bill Brandt's Madonna-like nude, or servants by laden pre-war Mayfair table, or black-faced miner by tin bath. For me, Fay Godwin's backlit Heptonstall. These are direct, sharp, powerful. They rely on no tricks to enhance impact. No tricksy toning or tinting. No softened focus, added mistiness. No sky-colouring graduated filters. Yet they become stronger with passing years while the tinted trite, the implemented impact, the fashionable foible, the passing pretty, the contrived composition wash away on the tide of time no matter how well crafted. As a two dimensional object they seek to represent the third. Yet they live by the fourth. They are of time. Unique in visual art, they do not fill emptiness within a frame or defined space, but select from infinite subject matter to exclude that outside the frame. That selection is from space, but also from time. It is a microscopic sliver of time, a photographer's life that is itself but a blink of light, a momentary glimmer, in the unimaginably vast darkness of our non-existence during time until now. It's too damned important to be 'creative' with. By being photographers, especially monochrome photographers, we are privileged. By eliminating colour, we elevate the experience of light. We abstract an image. We become ultra sensitive to light's play, its reflection, its shaping, forming and texturing. It is as if we were constantly subject to mind-enhancing drugs with heightened perception. (Have you ever seen 'ordinary' people – non-photographers that is – travelling in a car, bus or train apparently blind to the rush of fabulous imagery before them?) The mind becomes a gatherer of the crystal clear moments of image, and as we nourish that sensitiveness with enhanced craft skill to realise that penetrating clarity of perception in the print, the heart develops intuitiveness too. We begin to be able to photograph what we feel with intensity rather than what we see. Indeed, we may realise our feelings through what we select to photograph. We certainly reveal ourselves to others by that selection. The clarity of that image is not just the essence of photography, the thing that marks it out from all other media, but the frightening challenge to the photographer to move beyond the simple record to something that sees into the subject viewed from inside the photographer. Much easier to opt for chocolate box beauty, or contrived impact in perspective or colour, or colouring artificially by tone or brush. None of this will ever make a great enduring image. If, in its original 'pure' photographic form, the image is not strong, no amount of manipulation will make it so. In fact, many photographers unconsciously opt for manipulation because they cannot achieve that 'purity' of image. The lens-made monochrome image should be inherently critically sharp, and beautifully graduated, to realise its full potential even if we afterwards decide to treat it differently. In my coaching workshops with many positive, open-minded, hard-working, and imaginative photographers of all levels of experience, often with expensive and sophisticated equipment, I am constantly concerned that most just do not seem able to make a sharp graduated photograph, and mostly seem unaware of that fact. Next Page >> |
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Bothy, Inversnaid: Orange filter, Ilford HP5 Plus, DiXactol© two-bath developer, Ilford Ilfospeed RC paper, Neutol WA developer 1:7 @ 25°C, selenium toned.© Barry Thornton Page 4 of 5 |
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