Strand did and said many great things, but unless this quote has been taken out of context it is surely nonsense. It implies that all pictorialists have no personal vision and steal their ideas from others.
I don't find it so nonsensical, myself. I can easily imagine it coming long after the pictorialists' dominance had ended; say into the 1960's. By that time, attitudes toward pictorialism had crystalized. The quote expresses quite well the point of view that was common when I was an undergraduate. Pictorialism and pictorialists were scorned and reviled. You could say nothing that was harsh enough for them.
I think if you read the Strand quote closely, it is quite useful. Just set aside the word 'pictorial' for a second. What he is saying is that the minute you create a photograph in a way that you think someone else would make the same photograph, you are allowing an intermediary idea to muddle your vision. At the time he wrote this quote, that would be quite an accurate criticism for a lot of so-called 'Pictorial Photography'. People were churning out loads of stuff that had nothing to do with their own vision, and everything to do with what the Salon and Pictorial movements said was photographically appropriate. Ironically, the modernist movement begun by Strand, Weston, Adams, Stieglitz and others fell victim to the same problem. Their heirs, in many instances, are looking at, and recording, with the same 'vision' that Ansel or Edward would have used. When they made their photographs, this vision was fresh and exciting. Copying their same visual grammar today allows the same notion of an externally mediating concept to stand between the world and the artist's individual take on that world. Which is why showing a gallery owner a beautifully zoned and toned image of Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite is likely to be greeted with a yawn.
__________________
I just want to feel nostalgic like I used to.
I completely agree with you Clay: if a photographer is seeing the world through someone else's eyes then that's a problem. It's the sweeping dismissal of a whole genre of photography that irritates me.
But, remember, each era has its own peculiar contextual orientations, as does ours. Saying it today might be evidence of narrow minded nonsense, but in another time, your having said that it is could just as well be considered to be lacking in conviction, brilliant, stupid, wishy-washy, correct, hopelessly misguided or almost anything else. Today, maybe you are "right", but as perspectives change, you are going to be wrong, or just forgotten.
Our peculiar aesthetic bias today doesn't look with favor on the ideological blinders imposed by f/64 and friends, even though I think many of us value the work they did. Perhaps another time will value Strand's ideological perspective, or trash it completely, or assign it to irrelevance; we don't know. Fashions come and go. Intellectual fashions change just as much as those in apparel or interior design, but we are not often as aware of it.
It seems more important, at least to me, not to judge those perspectives as much as to try to understand them and the contexts that produce them. Unless we can accept them without having to agree or disagree with them, how can we possibly hope to understand our own biases and the usually invisible assumptions that lie beneath them?
Personally, we may regret that Mortensen was treated so badly both in his time and in the contemporaneous revision of history. We may regret that persons whom we may admire for other reasons could have acted in ways we find unbecoming.
Then again, I suppose our inability to separate ourselves from the battles is part of what drives the whole thing. Anyway, it is fun to watch the drama.
No doubt that the quote was unfairly dismissive of an entire genre of photography. Like all true-believers, Strand and Weston and Adams spent a lot of time defining themselves by what they were not, and maybe not as much time articulating what they really were. There was quite a lot of beautiful work that he tars with the pictorialist brush. If you ever run across a copy of the book "Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918" pick it up. There was an amazing amount of very creative work from that era that has survived the test of time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Leake
I completely agree with you Clay: if a photographer is seeing the world through someone else's eyes then that's a problem. It's the sweeping dismissal of a whole genre of photography that irritates me.
__________________
I just want to feel nostalgic like I used to.
If you ever run across a copy of the book "Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918" pick it up.
I wish people would stop recommending books - Amazon are making a fortune out of me! (That translates as: thanks Clay, my one-click order is on the way.)
"If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own,you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph. But if you keep your vision clear. you may make something which is at least a photograph, which has a life of it's own,as a tree or a matchbox has a life of it's own." - Paul Strand
Just thought to share this quote
Strand is one of my favorite photographers, but this was an incredibly arrogant thing to say.
One thing that nobody's mentioned here is the use of the term "pictorial". HE DOES NOT SAY "PICTORIALIST".
What I think he is talking about here is not necessarily a school or movement in photography, but very simply, representations of things seen with a standardized vision. Pictures of things are one thing, photographs might be something else. Most images that people make are footnotes to other images that WE have seen. Note, that I am here including myself as well, in potential. I am perfectly capable of applying formulaic structural organization to what's in front of the camera.
In this respect, I really don't think that Strand's comment is at all disrespectful of anyone in particular. It is simply encouragement to open MY eyes. Thanks Paul, I needed that.
I think that the way this comment is being interpreted has been set up by the discussion so far. That is, I think that meaning has been added to the comment that simply was not there to begin with. In order to verify it one way or the other, we would need to see the comment in its original context, not just OUR context.
Linear Mode
