Why Do Street Photography?

13 Friday Apr 2012

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Of all the types of photography, street photography is probably the least likely to make anyone money. Sure, some well-established, well-known street photographers can actually make a living selling prints and books of their street photos. But your chances of being able to make a go of it yourself are similar to your odds of winning the Powerball Lotto.

Even though street photographers may dream about supporting themselves financially purely from their street photography, some of the the main reasons photographers do street photography is that they can do it when and wherever they want, and also however they want. It’s a very personalized, freestyle form of photography that brings the photographer into contact with their environment–an environment that can include people, animals, cars, buildings, statues, signs, etc–and lets them discover and even create scenes and compositions from what is available.

Personally, I do street photography because it’s a fun challenge to find interesting photos, and also, because it makes me pay more attention to and discover more about my surroundings. Street photography is an excellent thing to do on trips to places that are new to me. It really helps you see things you might not otherwise notice.

So, why do street photography? Probably not to make money (though maybe someday it’ll lead to that). I think the reason to do street photography is to have fun, to get to know your surroundings at a more intense level, and to stimulate your visual creativity and spatial mental activity toward being a more curious and “alive” person…:-).

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Vision Trumps Technique

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by mgm in All, Commentary

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photography, technique, vision

Vision trumps technique.

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Candid Photography and Signal Detection Theory

09 Friday Mar 2012

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aesthetics, photography, signal detection, theory

I have a background in Cognitive Psychology (M.A.) and it occurred to me that candid photography–whether it be street photography or candid event photography–is in fact an act of “signal detection”.

For those unfamiliar with signal detection theory, here’s a simple description from a Hanover College Psychology web page:

A person is faced with a stimulus that is very faint or confusing. For simplicity’s sake lets us call this stimulus a signal. The person must make a decision, is the signal there or not. What makes this situation confusing and difficult is the presences of other mess that is similar to the signal. Let us call this mess noise.

What makes this different from traditional threshold theories is that the subject makes a decision, a cognitive act, as to whether the signal is present or not. This basic sensory act of determining if a stimulus occurred now is understood to have a cognitive component.

As a photographer, the signal you are trying to detect is “a good and/or interesting photograph”. However, there are usually lots of visual stimuli available in the immediate surroundings (i.e., “noise” or “mess”), and successfully identifying a “signal” (in our case, a good or interesting photograph) in this “mess” of stimuli often requires an experienced and/or trained eye.

Not only do you have the photographer’s training and experience to consider, but there’s also the situation itself.

In my experience, situations can vary greatly in terms of signal. At an event like a fashion show, festival, or parade there’s commonly a lot of “signal” available–i.e., many good or interesting photo possibilities present. In other situations, you may find it difficult to find *any* signal/good photos due to poor lighting, plain surrounds, lack of activity, etc.

One of the biggest challenges for a professional photographer is to find whatever “signal” is available regardless of the situation and the presence of distracting or misleading stimuli that are mere “noise”. Sometimes, this requires quite of bit of imagination and creative visualization.

One of my most satisfying experiences as a photographer is finding or detecting “signal” where others see only “noise”.

Maybe psychology is in fact a great background for a photographer…;p.

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Catering to the Masses

08 Thursday Mar 2012

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photography, popularity, quality, work

It is assumed among much of the population that all photographers and artists in general are aiming to make work that appeals to the greatest number of persons and gets the largest possible number of views or “likes” as possible. We can describe this quite simply as “catering to the masses”.

This assumption makes sense in terms of commercial considerations: usually the more “popular” a work is, the greater its money-earning potential.

Talk to any thoughtful artist you know, however, and you’ll discover there’s often a disconnect between the work they make that sells and the work they make that is actually personally important to them.

Each artist has his or her own unique trajectory of artistic growth and it is obviously more internally guided than outwardly or commercially guided. But artists have to eat and pay for a roof over their head. So they create popular works that sell…or they get a “day job” or find a partner that/who support them financially.

The assumption that artistic success = popularity/teeming congratulations seems to run rampant and can lead to artists giving up on work that actually has the greatest potential for providing them with true growth and their audiences with work that is truly insightful.

How many artistic geniuses died penniless because their artistic accomplishments were not recognized during their lifetimes? Of course, being a “starving artist” does not mean your work is good…and I’m not advocating that being penniless is a good idea…for anyone!

The main point here is that the quality or genius of an artist’s work cannot be evaluated by popularity or commercial success and that a lot of truly astute art may never be made because people with artistic ambitions think that it is.

This is not an original thought but it stands repeating:

Truly good or great work is not always rewarded with money or popularity.

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When it all starts looking the same…

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

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When the photos that people call “great” all start looking similar, I think it’s time to shoot something different and risk an absence of applause.

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Clever versus Truth in Photography

06 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by mgm in All, Commentary

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art, cleverness, photography, truth

Clever photographs are certainly nice to look at, but what about a photograph’s “truth”? If push comes to shove, I give truth the nod against cleverness.

“Clever” photos make use of unconventional perspectives, juxtapositions, scale, or framing to create an interesting image, sometimes sacrificing the viewer’s ability to learn anything useful or authentic about the pictured subject matter.

I’m not arguing against any cleverness in photography. Ideally, a photo is both clever and shows you something about the true nature of the subject matter. However, cleverness for cleverness’ sake–to the point of obscuring or distorting accurate information about the pictured subject–is unsatisfying and disappointing to me*.

Here’s what I like about photography: it obediently captures visual reality. The photographer “steers” the camera to capture the reality s/he sees and is interested in, but the camera simply records whatever is focused on it’s light sensitive image capturing medium (film or digital sensor) when the shutter button is pressed.

I like that.

The photographer is admittedly influencing what is captured and how, so the photograph taken is not at all immune from the photographer’s decisions, views, beliefs, or values; but it doesn’t have to be. Variation among different photographers is itself an interesting aspect of photography….and is maybe an additional topic for another day.

The key point for me is I want photos that tell me something truthful and useful–something about the way things really are.

Understanding life begins with an accurate view of what life is made of. Photographs that do not mislead in the service of “cleverness” can help in that quest.

*(Note: if a photographer has purposely created misleading images for the purposes of entertainment, what I’ve said above does not apply.)

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Photographs: Heart, Head and Beyond

31 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Photographs can be stimulating in different ways. A photograph can be informational, emotional, and/or intellectual.

At its base, a photograph provides visual information about the photographed subject. The subject can be a static object or a split second from a dynamic event (e.g., a photograph of cars racing on a track).

A photograph records the visual information available when light reflects off of a physical object; a photograph is informational. Of course, the way the the photograph is framed (what is included in the frame), the perspective, and what if anything is in sharp focus impacts what information is actually provided or communicated. Regardless, the photograph provides visual information because of its very nature. Whether that information makes sense or is of any use to a viewer is another issue and gets into the “utility” of the photograph for the viewer, which varies depending on the viewer. (It seems likely that the more utility a photograph has for a viewer, the more “informative” the viewer would judge it to be.)

Another type of stimulation that can be provided by a photograph is emotional.

These are photographs that appeal to the viewer’s emotions, and the subject matter can encompass nearly anything to which people have emotional attachments: people (babies, children, men, women, couples, nudes) , landscapes, nature, animals, sunsets, artifacts (objects associated with people), and so on. This is the primary category of imagery that photography enthusiasts pursue and to which the general population responds to and calls “good/great photography”. Strong emotional response is taken as a self-evident proof that a photograph is good, and the intensity of the affective response is the de facto measure of its greatness.

Most people do not recognize any other purpose or “effect” of photography beyond the informational and emotional; however, there is another purpose or effect of photography, and it has to do with intellectual stimulation.

It turns out that photography is a ingenious means for exploring and illuminating (sic) concepts and ideas..that are more “in the head” than “in the heart”. Even as I write this, I realize I should make it clear that in practice, it’s difficult to separate out the emotional, informational and intellectual; often some degree of two or more aspects are present in a particular photograph. The range is quite sizable, but there are clearly some photographs in the fine art world that have virtually no emotional component, yet are still quite compelling and desirable…some worth thousands or millions of dollars to collectors. These are the photographs referred to as “Deadpan” in Charlotte Cotton’s book, “the photograph as contemporary art“.

So the “two-dimensional” photograph turns out to have the potential for amazing complexity. There are informational, emotional, and intellectual components, each can be present to a different degree, and they can mix in various and sophisticated ways.

Anyone recognizing and appreciating the flexible potential of a photograph will be rewarded with an enduring and facile source of multi-faceted stimulation and exploration!

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