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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