Sensitivity And Insensitivity

A photograph can reproduce the world in greater detail and subtlety than any other medium. Photographers love photography for its inherent qualities.

Whenever a photograph digresses from its innate ability to represent the world in fine detail, fine gradation, and fine color, the photograph is weakened.

Fashions come and go. A few years ago, there was a "soot and whitewash" fad. Every photograph had to be too contrasty! The magazines, like "Black and White", printed everything the same, as if they thought they knew better than the photographer how it should look.
It influenced photographers to work that way. A wrong direction propogated!

Today, there is a fashion to make black and white photographs dramatic, too dark, moody, depressing, mostly black. The photographers doing this don't like photography, although they profess to. They are insensitive to the subject and the image. They suppress the inherent qualities of the medium in favor of their "expression".

In color, the fashion is for, at a minimum, HDR or tweaked color. What's wrong with accurate color? The photographers want to "express" themselves.
Those photographers, frustrated painters, want to make their picture look more like painting. This is a wrong direction from the time of Steiglitz. Paul Strand saw this error in 1929 and changed the way he worked.

Listen up! You cannot make a photograph that doesn't express yourself! When you apply that shit to a photograph, it is "over-expression"!

The great photographers didn't do it! Do you think Atget, Abbott, Adams, Weston, White, Strand, etc., were just stupid, or ignorant?
You think you are a better photogrspher than them?

Ansel Adams wrote, "Bald whites and detailless blacks in the print are the mark of the insensitive photographer". I would add, overly dark gloomy prints, and tweaked color are the mark of the insensitivity to the photograph.

Go back to the roots of fine photography. See how the masters worked. Photography was difficult then. Exposure, processing, and printing demanded artistry and craft.

Today it is easy. Digital cameras make everybody look good. People are making pictures today who don't know squat about photography.
They are cutting their teeth on tons of forgettable pictures, being influenced by trash, and wasting energy while producing trash.

If you take a picture with your cell, you are a photographer. If you say it's "fine art photography", it is. There is nobody to set the record straight.

If I should comment on somebody's picture on FAA, I will be flamed! There is no room for criticism in FAA, and that's a problem for those who see!

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