Photography

As pointed out by my tutor, I've been remiss at going to galleries and viewing other peoples' photographs. This highlights a couple of points:-

Living in rural Warwickshire, the nearest galleries are in Birmingham, but in practice all the action is in London, or perhaps the national photography museum in Bradford with a number of shows at the Fox Talbot museum in Lacock. So getting to galleries on a regular basis is not easy to achieve.

The second point was highlighted in this weeks' AP magazine, that the 6 billionth photograph has just been uploaded to Flikr, almost one for every person on the planet!

Now clearly, a lot of imagery on Flikr isn't of the calibre of what we've been taught to be 'great', as defined by the masters of the genre, such a Salgado, Cartier-Bresson, Bailey, Steve McCurry etc..., but with 6bn to choose from, there are a lot of superb photographs to look at.

So what distinguishes the millions of good photographs from the ones which make it as iconic images?

This is something which came up at my recent photography workshop in the village - I compiled a powerpoint of some of the iconic photographs ever made. The vast majority were news or current affairs related in one way or the other. Then there were a significant number of fashion, film and music album cover related images. Of course, these get massive exposure via newspapers and the internet, helping to bring them into the public consciousness.

Of those 'fine art' photographs, in the main, the group of people attending my workshop had never seen any of them, unless they regularly read the likes to National Geographic or the photographic press. So despite these being excellent images, they generally didn't make it as iconic images.

The one thing which did make the iconic images stand out is the time when they were shot, a kind of golden age of photojournalism from the 1930's to the 1980's, when photography was done on film and the number of serious practitioners were finite. Now of course, the number of images to choose from is almost limitless.

So in this case, where's the best place to view other peoples' work?

I can review the 'masters of photography' in books, a number of which I have only shelves at home. However, increasingly as technology moves on, the style of photography has moved on and the artistic scope has increased massively. For instance composite images, multi-exposures, post processing and HDR techniques have resulted in images which were simply not possible in years gone by, and yet still offer an artistic style which cannot be ignored when studying the medium.

Then as mentioned, there's the likes of Flikr. Here the problem is different. Yes the images are catalogued in various ways, but its hard to understand the collective message and style that any individual photographer is trying to communicate. Of course with 6bn to choose from, my comments are clearly a hopeless generalisation!

Then there are the living photo-libraries such as the images presented on the Magnum website. By their own admission, their glory days are fast receding, but the organisation is still responsible for cutting edge imagery from around the work in the present day.

However the unavoidable truth from all this is that with so many photographers out there, any attempt at studying contempory imagery is bound to skim the surface of what's out there.

All this has led me to reconsider photography as a medium to study. Yes, its always fun to checkout the latest gadgetry - that's the primary purpose of the photographic industry after all. But when looking at other peoples' images, I find I can only relate to them if they are directly linked to my life and experience - fantastic images of, for instance, somebody's dog, whilst I can appreciate the attention to detail and artistic flair, are of limited interest.

Is this good or bad? Am I just too insular and unwilling to take on new ideas, or is this a great incentive to create my own images, shots which have a direct interest to me and those who share a common interest. I guess there's a bit of both in there.

So am I going to make more of an effort to get out to galleries and study a broader range of work on the internet and in books, yes of course. But although I may be limited geographically in what I can go and look at, I am in fact overwhelmed by a near infinite number of images to choose from!