The final print is the finished work so at the end of the day that’s what counts. But having said that, the process is also important to me. I’m much more likely to be impressed by a splendid print which is part of a coherent body of work created by a photographer who’s mastered their chosen process, than by a splendid print created by serendipity or with a simple process. It’s the difference between, “That’s special and unique to that photographer,” and, “That’s nice, but anyone could do it.”
I can buy the notion of photography as performance art, especially if one is doing wet-plate collodion or such, where you can make the act of photographing into a performance. What gets me though, are the idiots who are performance artists who claim that their performance is photography - those who make photographs of their performances and insist that they are not photographers, and that what they are doing is not photography - they are 'artists who use cameras'. Where's the difference? To cite an extreme example, that Mapplethorpe photo of himself with a bullwhip up his ass... that's certainly an act of performance art, but it's also a photograph.
Thank you Scott, (I've not seen that one) what a lovely mental image that forms
In descending order of importance;
1) Looking for photographs. I love the way my senses become keener while out photographing, how I become so much more aware and more visually curious. There's also that race between a scene in nature unfolding before me, and being able to manage the gear, the metering, the choice of exposure, and what development to give that I love.
2) Developing the negatives. After developing negatives in a tray in total darkness there's that building anticipation for the moment you can turn on the light, and see them for the first time. Magic.
3) Printing. This ones last because there are so many negatives that'll never make it onto paper that it can't be the reason I photograph. Only the 'keepers' get to be reborn as positives. There have been times while printing that the hairs on my arm have stood on end so there's excitement in printing, but compared to the act of finding photographs while meandering through the rain forest, wandering up a creek, or discovering some new hidden gem, printing is a distant third.
Murray
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Note to self: Turn your negatives into positives.
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The term "performance" as it is used in the book I referred to is not identical to the term "performance art" à la Laurie Anderson.
Think of it this way: "work" in English means both an action and an object. "I work" vs. "I have a work hanging on my wall." In French, we use "travail" for an action and "oeuvre" or "ouvrage" for an object being the result of the latter.
The point of "Art as Performance" is that when you are appreciating a work of art, you are appreciating "travail" not just "oeuvre." In other words, a painting as a physical object is a gateway to the process of its making, both physical and intellectual. There are many people in aesthetics who reduce an artwork to the sense-data it provides to the viewer, but we all know that there is no such thing as an innocent eye: there is no masterpiece without prior appreciation of where it comes from, even if said appreciation of context is not done in full awareness.
Stephen Shore nowadays refers to photographs as "solving a problem," which is somewhat similar to this view: a full appreciation of a work involves understanding what kind of work-travail was necessary to get there. It's not about intention per se, it's about what was done to get to the result. When we are blown away by a photograph, it's also because we understand the value of what was done to create it.
You can thus account for the value of originality, the technical mastery, but also the thematic strength and the depth of reflection behind a work of art.
So the "process" part of appreciating a photograph is not limited to appreciating the quality of the silver gelatin paper or of the film's fine-grain: it's appreciating as well the intelligence of its maker in producing it, in "solving its problem" to reuse Shore's words. In Ansel Adams's terminology, it would amount to appreciating not only the surface of the finished print, not only the darkroom work, but also the process of (pre)visualization.
Look at the way we criticize photos: "a good idea but poorly executed," "a cliché," "a profound work of daring originality," etc. All these comments do not point to a physical object: they point to the actions that somebody did!
__________________ Using film since before it was hip.
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of those who care about the process, are those who have struggled with and enjoyed the process.
The others who care about the process are either those who have learned from others that the process matters, or those who, being impressed with the print, have expended the effort to learn how it was done, and to appreciate how it was done.
The process imbues a character and quality into the print (or transparency, or motion picture). Other characteristics and qualities are imbued by the steps taken in framing, focusing, exposing, editing, and possibly manipulating the intermediate physical or electronic media.
I think back to something my father said on more than one occasion. He worked for Kodak for more than 1/3 of a century, and the labs he worked in (in the customer service and marketing divisions) processed millions of miles of movie film.
On the west coast of Canada, we were probably near the outer edges of the North American commercial movie distribution system. If we went to a movie as a family, he would be absolutely irritated by a scratch or other defects in the "print". As I became more and more involved in the photographic world, more and more I'd share the same response. I am confident, however, that most of the audience barely noticed those scratches and defects, because their mind set would allow them to see past them.
That doesn't mean that the same audiences would be oblivious to a pristine print that revealed wonderful cinematography. It just means that they weren't so attuned to it.
This thread is very much a question about perception. Perception is one of those things that is most influenced by experience and education.
When it comes to prints, I probably get too close, and look too carefully at the details. I think it comes with the territory, but I need to reduce the tendency.
it depends on the day and the year ..
alot of the time i find myself exposing film
and maybe processing it, and never making prints.
sometimes i don't even put film in my camera,
and i find shooting with no film at all
to be as (or more) important than making prints.
Ehmmm... both. Since we don't have to pick whether we'd rather have a hen or an egg, why not take both.
Exactly. Unfortunately the attitude out there that it can not be "both" and anyone using traditional methods for any art form must only care about process
put too much emphasis on being perfect and nothing is ever truly finished
1 week on 1 thing gets you nowhere if you constantly remake everything
Work on something till you feel it's done ..not perfect, just done
and you will have a vast amount of good work ..which you can then choose from to spend even more time on perfecting if you so choose
1 week on 10 things and you may end up with -on average- 4 or 5 that really say something and that also refine your decision making/boost your creativity by seeing what can come of something eventhough may not be perfect from the onset
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