Three Perspectives on Photography - Paul Hill

Three Perspectives on Photography

Photographic truth, metaphor and individual expression – Paul Hill.

“It is my contention that the metaphoric use of the camera to mirror the personal experiences and feelings of the photographer is its most exciting application’.

Paul Hill – Three Perspectives on Photography

Paul explains how he sees every photograph as a metaphor, that a person, or a tree, become symbols on a piece of paper.  He states that in his experience people rarely think about the process, the science behind the image.  They do not think about the chemical process, the silver and the coloured dyes reacting to light.  This essay was published in 1979 when photography was reliant on the dark room, on the skills and experience of the printer.  Images were changed and manipulated by skilled practitioners who were seen by the majority as craftsmen to be revered.  Today the digital process has become more process orientated than creatively led.  If a person asks about a camera they are more likely to ask about the resolution than the optical quality.  When viewing a print they are more likely to comment on the Photoshop techniques used rather than the creative vision of the photographer.  I would argue that now Paul’s statement has thoughts of photography in 1979 have been superseded by the diametrically opposed view that the majority of viewers now see the process more than the image.

Paul goes on to state that a photograph is “an object that you can hold and feel”, but how many photographs today make it to print?  Our view of photography was often restricted by the process, which tried to match colour and contrast of the image to a ‘true’ world.  The majority of images were shot on colour negative film with a neutral contrast and slightly desaturated spectrum, and printed on silver or dye based paper processed to be viewed at a short viewing distance.  When shooting an image the photographer had firstly the option of colour or black and white.  This was seen as the difference between serious photography, black and white, and amateur photography, colour negative.  Photographers, such as William Eggleston, successfully challenged and changed this view.  If colour was the chosen path then the serious photographer would use colour transparency film and print it using Cibachrome.  This was often criticized because the colours were rich and vibrant with the highly glossy surface helping to give a contrast, punchy feel to the image.  The less acceptable face of photographic reproduction now appears to be the norm.  The overwhelming percentages of images are now viewed solely on monitors.  These transmitted images are more often than not on uncaibrated monitors that are overly right and over saturated.  The idea of photographs as being tactile now seems to becoming a thing of the past.

Paul uses Oscar Rejlader’s image The Dream as an example of an image with Freudian overtones.  He states that the  British public prefer objectivism to ‘all that self expression stuff’.  He states that

“the photograph can, and should, tell you more about the photographer than the ‘real’ world.”

He goes on to say

“When Rejlander died in 1875, a writer remarked: ‘He saw things unconventionally, which is what few photographers do; he did not weary us with insisting on detail were it was not needed”.  How little things have changed in the last 100 years of photography.”

Over the 33 years since the ‘Three Perspectives’ this could be said to have moved further from the Rejlander ideal.  When using film photographers where quite happy to accept that fine detail would be degraded by the physical composition of the recording medium.  Today with ever expanding pixel counts we find that there is an obsession with increased sharpness.  I recently watched an interview with the landscape photographer Julian Calverly.  In this he describes how the person who does his large format prints successfully sharpens his images.  Calverly shoots on an Alpa medium format camera with a Schneider lens onto an IQ180 back.  This must surely be one of the sharpest camera/back combinations available, and yet he feels that his large, very atmospheric landscapes need further sharpening.  He does, however, manage to present an impression of himself in his work.  You form an opinion of the photographer by his consistency both in subject matter and tonal qualities; this is despite the attention to fine detail.  By the use of viewpoint, exposure and filtration Calverly is presenting his interpretation of the world, he is interpreting and creating not recording.  This forces me to as – have we reached a point where technical excellence and emotive imagery have become happy bedfellows?

Hill introduces Eugene Atget who’s photographs, as with Calverly’s, transcends record making.  He suggests that Atget’s often deserted, more often surreal images are more self-portraits than records.  Is this not true of any photographer who strives to develop any considered series of photographs?  Photography is an emotional reaction to a subject; otherwise we would be no better that speed cameras reacting to external stimuli.  Every time we isolate a scene through the viewfinder, editing the world in front of us, we are making a statement about our selves.  When we then add that image to a series that we have processed either in the darkroom or in Photoshop we are exposing part of our soul to the world for its judgment.  When a photographer creates a documentary photograph they are editing the world in the same manner, they are taking a frame from the motion picture that is our world.  Added to this our socio-economic and ethic influences colour our view of the subject.  The next influential factor when interpreting images is the viewer’s standpoint.  Are they a documentarian or a self-expressionist?  Are they a technician or an artist?  So whom should the photographer be aiming to produce images for?  The answer is simple, themselves.  Firstly you must create images that satisfy your needs; weather that is to express some inner feeling or right a social injustice, you must be happy with your product.

I would like to suggest that there is a third category of photographer, the intellectual practitioner.  Hill talks about “Ivory Towers” as being very middle class.  This may or may not be accurate, but the intellectual would appear to dominate the tallest of these structures.  There is a section of photography that relies as much, if not more, on the written explanation than the visual creation.  This dependence on ‘art speak’ would appear to be a defense mechanism to avoid the ever more accessible arena of photography from encroaching on their lofty positions.  They would have us sneer at the self-expressionists and condemn the documentarians as mere recorders.  Often these practitioners are using none original, or harvested, images from other sources and create a mystique around their practice to elevate the activity.  I do not condemn the activity outright.  Photographers, or artists, such as John Baldassari have undoubtedly helped to expand the boundaries of acceptable photographic art.  I do criticize all of those who have taken his ideas and diluted them by weak imitations.

So what is my personal stance?  Photography is a product of your development from childhood, not just your educated years.  You take these early influences ad add them to the stimuli and flavourings produced by others and develop your individual response to a subject.  The emphasis should always be on your response.  The intellectual exercise is primarily aimed at acceptance into a clique or tribe; if you have not produced the work for yourself then that acceptance will be short lived.