BORNING PHOTOS
Because of the recent karmopada there is no possibility to put photos, they follow the link. Sorry.
Petteri SULONEN, Helsinki
“Watch out for cliches” (Michael Johnston)
')
A photo
One of the funniest photography books I have seen in the past few years is a very small, brown, low-key volume from Phaidon. It is called "Boring postcards." It seems to me that the German name “Langweilige Postkarten” is even more challenging.
This is a collection of carefully selected, carefully printed ... boring postcards. And yet the parade of gas stations, dining cars, supermarkets, highways, airports, and other extremely non-photogenic objects, often photographed without the slightest amount of effort, is incredibly amusing, being presented as a collection .
A photo
A boring photo from Boring Postcards. Type conceptual art?
The signatures read “Virginia Restaurant, Williamsburg, Virginia” and “Famous Blue Grill on US 40, St. Elm, Ill.” (No, this is not copyright infringement; this is a “derivative work”. By the way, the copyright on postcards is already Expired, and the book itself does not even have a copyright notice.)
But still, from the most boring photos of the book will not work, even if they are brought together. They are just too boring. So boring that even a thick layer of irony in a publication would not give enough context to make them interesting.
Anatomy of a boring photo
Boring photos are not the ones you might think about first. Photos from the home album are not boring. On the contrary, they are one of the most interesting photos, especially if the album belongs to you or your friend. The feeling of turning the pages of the album is incomparable, the cards gradually turn yellow and fade with each visit. The photo album is a condensed memory: as a “pile”, a knotted letter of the Incas, it is understandable only in the presence of human memory filling the voids, but mystically it awakens memories even in its absence. I'd rather be flipping through someone's family album than going to an exhibition full of pretentious, big ... boring photos.
A photo
Boring photos? Never in my life! You talk about my friends. And about me.
Half-closed by the page - newlyweds Kossu and Outi, on the page on the left, in silly sneakers and a funny hat - I, maybe in one of my races to St. Petersburg, drinking two cans of Nevsky at once, to save time (well, there were days!), And on the right is Andy, Sanna, Yarmo and me. Andy is my best friend, he will soon marry, and I will go to Montana on occasion.
Photography is one foot in art, and the other in utility. Most of the photos are strictly utilitarian - the one who took the picture had a very definite intention, be it memory preservation, documenting news, or selling toothpaste. This kind of photos is rarely really boring. They are not allowed, otherwise they will not be able to serve their purpose. Boring photography flourishes in the realm of the so-called "fine art" - that is, photos, whose main reason for existence is the "thing in itself." “Dinge an sich” , would add people who gave us Langweilige Postkarten.
A photo
Sunset, waves breaking on rocks, low clouds, what else do you need? Although there are no mountains.
Something terrible happens to people when they suddenly realize that the camera in their hands can reproduce things that exist in themselves. They suddenly stop taking interesting photos - photos that fill their albums, tell stories, evoke emotions, save memory. They begin to make endless macro flowers and portraits of ducks. After all, as they progress in what they consider to be the art of photography, they can reach soft, smoky portraits of cutesy women (optional clothing), black-and-white, sadly lit and carefully ennobled nude models with perfect bodies on black background, eagles, flapping wings in zoos or wild reserves, motorbikes, laying a sharp turn on the track, the scenery of the “golden hour” with mountains and water, or macro bugs. In the end, one of them can understand the futility of all of this and become a rebel, removing evil series of poorly exposed, grainy and muddy images about anything, or putting cutesy girls in vinyl and plastering them with cosmetics, and calling it a "fetish photo." Go to Photosig , and you are guaranteed to see tons of such pictures on the “Featured Photos” page and on the “Photos” page. And, of course, open any forum on DPReview, and almost certainly there will be at least one thread with flower macro on the first page. Gum for the eyes.
I just looked: on the Featured Photos page - four smoky cutesy women, including one in a wedding dress, one sadly lit nude model, two mountain landscapes of the “golden hour”, one duck (from the reserve), one macro (with two bugs), one rally car racing along the road, and one kind of muddy photo about anything. Also, one grimacing child who would look very interesting in the home album, two storm landscapes ... and one really good scene in the bookshop, with the lady deep in thought and an interesting light from the window.
A photo
A bug and a flower in one frame, well, well!
Boredom and more cameras
There is nothing particularly wrong with a boring photo. It can even be fun; technical difficulties make the process of shooting interesting (at least temporarily), and there is always the satisfaction of knowing the trick - looking at boring photos of other people, you can say, “Aha! I know how he did it! ”But still, with the passage of time it becomes less tolerable.
Most amateur photographers are technologists in a greater or lesser degree. I know several who are not, who for years and years use the same old shabby Nikon and the only lens. I would like to think of myself as falling into that category, but alas, this is not so - I am such a tech love man, which happens. I would spend all my income on the cameras if I didn’t have a wife to remind me of more important things in life.
The question is why?
I believe that the underlying reason is the unconscious dissatisfaction that comes after you stop making a hobby for yourself and start making it for others. No matter how many flower macro or smoky girls you took, after the first jolt, as soon as you got them just as sharp or smoky or cherished as you wanted, you end up looking at them and feeling the vague emptiness inside. And then the natural impulse is to fill this void with the purchase of more delightful equipment that is offered to us from all sides.
What should we take to fill the voids,
In which the hungry waves rumble?
Let's go to the sea
Looking for new applause?
Buy a new guitar?
Let's start the car more powerful?
From Nether, Roger Waters
What is bad in buying new cameras (or lenses, flashes, whatever) - it works. In any case, not for long. As long as you play with it, you go and shoot. Since your new toy is different from the old ones, you do everything differently, and you get something that doesn’t leave any voids inside you. Then again you start thinking about other people, return to the rut, and start to give out more floral macro and smoky girls, and the emptiness inside starts to grow again, and you start to want some more piece of equipment, and one fine day your wallet is enough fat, and you, no longer able to restrain yourself, go and buy, and get another push, from which the next time it is easier to give in. Somewhere in the middle of the path, emptiness can turn into bitterness, and you will start making snide comments on blurred elegant pictures, or poorly focused technically bad pictures, or people with the wrong camera brand. And all this time - still flower macro and smoky girls.
A photo
Badly exposed and blurred image about anything. Well, except about cracked concrete tiles. Probably, if I called it “Concrete Abstraction”, it should have been an allegorical description of urban expansion and a long road to the house ...
Someday you might think, “let it go!” And start producing muddy, grainy, ugly pictures about anything, and get temporary energy from overthrowing all the idols that you so hard created until you realize that now you just follow another set of agreements to appeal to another crowd, only now it is a smaller crowd that likes to wear black, smoke a lot and hang out in a cafe. And all this time, the little creative you, who originally dragged you into a hobby, whimpers in some damp, dusty, web-covered corner of your soul, rejected and forgotten, having no other way to be heard, except through this sense of emptiness, silence which you are desperately trying to fill with shutter clicks and megapixels and lenses with fluorite elements and A3 + format printers, and Alien Bee illuminators and old battered Leiky.
We need it?
Main question. The question that many of us will face, sooner or later, perhaps after the emptiness stretches into a needle of disappointment disguised as anger that night when we drink too much and build a fire from our negatives or CDs or on what there we store our precious "works". What for? Why do we spend such an inordinate amount of time and effort, thinking about cameras, discussing cameras, operating cameras, buying cameras, selling cameras? Did it lure us into photography first? Usually the reasons were not named or not formed consciously; more often they are simply forgotten.
My first impression of a photo as something in itself happened when I was 10 years old and my father made some prints from a black and white film taken during his trip to America. On these frames were killer whales. I was with him in the dark room, and watched the black-and-white silhouettes slowly appear. I still remember the admiration and the feeling that I should learn this.
A photo
I took this at 12 years old. We were on a school farm trip. I borrowed parent Minolta and took pictures like crazy. The right lens on my glasses had to be replaced, because it was scratched by the viewfinder so that I could not watch it. Then I spent the whole weekend printing, because I was selling prints to the whole class, about 25 cents per card. This is my classmate Tommy in the picture, and the girl's name is Outi ... or not? I can not say from the photo; the name just popped into my head. Maybe the negatives are still somewhere; this is a photograph of a photograph ...
At first, photography is instinctive. Some people are so talented that they need nothing more; only talent and experience. The rest of us will someday have to start consciously working on what we are doing, be it attention to the composition “by the rules”, dissecting the work of our favorite photographers, assigning tasks to ourselves (“one photo a day, every day, with one lens and one type of film; no more, no less ”), joining photo clubs by camera, or sending our work to Photosig. All this starts to pull in the direction of flattery. Most of us give in to her at one moment or another. Some never manage to free themselves from the deceptive shackles of flower macro and smoky girls. And others turn their passion into a profession, and begin to shoot flower macro and smoky girls for money, for clients, also chained in invisible chains of general agreements. And with each click of the shutter, our little character retreats farther and farther into the spider-like nooks of the soul.
But one way or another, many manage to free themselves. They come to the point where they ask themselves the main question. Then they either find some answers and again start taking interesting photos, or throw a photo altogether, or find inspiration in its search.
To ask a question is the key. The answers then have no special meaning.
Art form for all the rest of us
Very few of us have the ability to stick a pencil to paper and to depict something even remotely interesting. My sister can do this. Her boyfriend can do it even better. He is from Australia, Hin Chua . A spark of promethean fire burns brightly in both of them. They do not need a photograph, although in fact they are very good in it.
For a real, zealous artist, photography is a carrier among other carriers. For the rest, this is one of the few ways in which we can get an object of artistic value. Even a completely random snapshot can be interesting, and the technologies are so simple that it takes only a few days to train and instruct to get basic skills of consciously acquiring images. Even this level of technical awareness is completely unnecessary - with modern cameras a simple “brought and clicked” can create a work of art that is as valuable to the last piece as David, painstakingly carved out of marble boulders.
Photography is an art form that is most suitable for us, non-creative people. Of all the arts she produces her works in direct, physical connection with the outside world - and the world itself is interesting. A photographer does not need to be a creative genius to make interesting or artistically valuable objects - he just has to notice all the interesting things happening in the world. What he lacks in genius will be completed by his subjects. All you need to get interesting photos is to go out into the world and take them.
2005 © Petteri Sulonen (text, photo)
2006 © www.x3photo.ru (translated into Russian)
HE
Also recommend
WHY MOST LANDSCAPE IS BORED
IS IT POSSIBLE TO LEARN COMPOSITIONS?
HOW TO REMOVE ON THE STREET
Well, the rest that you find.
Petteri SULONEN, Helsinki
“Watch out for cliches” (Michael Johnston)
')
A photo
One of the funniest photography books I have seen in the past few years is a very small, brown, low-key volume from Phaidon. It is called "Boring postcards." It seems to me that the German name “Langweilige Postkarten” is even more challenging.
This is a collection of carefully selected, carefully printed ... boring postcards. And yet the parade of gas stations, dining cars, supermarkets, highways, airports, and other extremely non-photogenic objects, often photographed without the slightest amount of effort, is incredibly amusing, being presented as a collection .
A photo
A boring photo from Boring Postcards. Type conceptual art?
The signatures read “Virginia Restaurant, Williamsburg, Virginia” and “Famous Blue Grill on US 40, St. Elm, Ill.” (No, this is not copyright infringement; this is a “derivative work”. By the way, the copyright on postcards is already Expired, and the book itself does not even have a copyright notice.)
But still, from the most boring photos of the book will not work, even if they are brought together. They are just too boring. So boring that even a thick layer of irony in a publication would not give enough context to make them interesting.
Anatomy of a boring photo
Boring photos are not the ones you might think about first. Photos from the home album are not boring. On the contrary, they are one of the most interesting photos, especially if the album belongs to you or your friend. The feeling of turning the pages of the album is incomparable, the cards gradually turn yellow and fade with each visit. The photo album is a condensed memory: as a “pile”, a knotted letter of the Incas, it is understandable only in the presence of human memory filling the voids, but mystically it awakens memories even in its absence. I'd rather be flipping through someone's family album than going to an exhibition full of pretentious, big ... boring photos.
A photo
Boring photos? Never in my life! You talk about my friends. And about me.
Half-closed by the page - newlyweds Kossu and Outi, on the page on the left, in silly sneakers and a funny hat - I, maybe in one of my races to St. Petersburg, drinking two cans of Nevsky at once, to save time (well, there were days!), And on the right is Andy, Sanna, Yarmo and me. Andy is my best friend, he will soon marry, and I will go to Montana on occasion.
Photography is one foot in art, and the other in utility. Most of the photos are strictly utilitarian - the one who took the picture had a very definite intention, be it memory preservation, documenting news, or selling toothpaste. This kind of photos is rarely really boring. They are not allowed, otherwise they will not be able to serve their purpose. Boring photography flourishes in the realm of the so-called "fine art" - that is, photos, whose main reason for existence is the "thing in itself." “Dinge an sich” , would add people who gave us Langweilige Postkarten.
A photo
Sunset, waves breaking on rocks, low clouds, what else do you need? Although there are no mountains.
Something terrible happens to people when they suddenly realize that the camera in their hands can reproduce things that exist in themselves. They suddenly stop taking interesting photos - photos that fill their albums, tell stories, evoke emotions, save memory. They begin to make endless macro flowers and portraits of ducks. After all, as they progress in what they consider to be the art of photography, they can reach soft, smoky portraits of cutesy women (optional clothing), black-and-white, sadly lit and carefully ennobled nude models with perfect bodies on black background, eagles, flapping wings in zoos or wild reserves, motorbikes, laying a sharp turn on the track, the scenery of the “golden hour” with mountains and water, or macro bugs. In the end, one of them can understand the futility of all of this and become a rebel, removing evil series of poorly exposed, grainy and muddy images about anything, or putting cutesy girls in vinyl and plastering them with cosmetics, and calling it a "fetish photo." Go to Photosig , and you are guaranteed to see tons of such pictures on the “Featured Photos” page and on the “Photos” page. And, of course, open any forum on DPReview, and almost certainly there will be at least one thread with flower macro on the first page. Gum for the eyes.
I just looked: on the Featured Photos page - four smoky cutesy women, including one in a wedding dress, one sadly lit nude model, two mountain landscapes of the “golden hour”, one duck (from the reserve), one macro (with two bugs), one rally car racing along the road, and one kind of muddy photo about anything. Also, one grimacing child who would look very interesting in the home album, two storm landscapes ... and one really good scene in the bookshop, with the lady deep in thought and an interesting light from the window.
A photo
A bug and a flower in one frame, well, well!
Boredom and more cameras
There is nothing particularly wrong with a boring photo. It can even be fun; technical difficulties make the process of shooting interesting (at least temporarily), and there is always the satisfaction of knowing the trick - looking at boring photos of other people, you can say, “Aha! I know how he did it! ”But still, with the passage of time it becomes less tolerable.
Most amateur photographers are technologists in a greater or lesser degree. I know several who are not, who for years and years use the same old shabby Nikon and the only lens. I would like to think of myself as falling into that category, but alas, this is not so - I am such a tech love man, which happens. I would spend all my income on the cameras if I didn’t have a wife to remind me of more important things in life.
The question is why?
I believe that the underlying reason is the unconscious dissatisfaction that comes after you stop making a hobby for yourself and start making it for others. No matter how many flower macro or smoky girls you took, after the first jolt, as soon as you got them just as sharp or smoky or cherished as you wanted, you end up looking at them and feeling the vague emptiness inside. And then the natural impulse is to fill this void with the purchase of more delightful equipment that is offered to us from all sides.
What should we take to fill the voids,
In which the hungry waves rumble?
Let's go to the sea
Looking for new applause?
Buy a new guitar?
Let's start the car more powerful?
From Nether, Roger Waters
What is bad in buying new cameras (or lenses, flashes, whatever) - it works. In any case, not for long. As long as you play with it, you go and shoot. Since your new toy is different from the old ones, you do everything differently, and you get something that doesn’t leave any voids inside you. Then again you start thinking about other people, return to the rut, and start to give out more floral macro and smoky girls, and the emptiness inside starts to grow again, and you start to want some more piece of equipment, and one fine day your wallet is enough fat, and you, no longer able to restrain yourself, go and buy, and get another push, from which the next time it is easier to give in. Somewhere in the middle of the path, emptiness can turn into bitterness, and you will start making snide comments on blurred elegant pictures, or poorly focused technically bad pictures, or people with the wrong camera brand. And all this time - still flower macro and smoky girls.
A photo
Badly exposed and blurred image about anything. Well, except about cracked concrete tiles. Probably, if I called it “Concrete Abstraction”, it should have been an allegorical description of urban expansion and a long road to the house ...
Someday you might think, “let it go!” And start producing muddy, grainy, ugly pictures about anything, and get temporary energy from overthrowing all the idols that you so hard created until you realize that now you just follow another set of agreements to appeal to another crowd, only now it is a smaller crowd that likes to wear black, smoke a lot and hang out in a cafe. And all this time, the little creative you, who originally dragged you into a hobby, whimpers in some damp, dusty, web-covered corner of your soul, rejected and forgotten, having no other way to be heard, except through this sense of emptiness, silence which you are desperately trying to fill with shutter clicks and megapixels and lenses with fluorite elements and A3 + format printers, and Alien Bee illuminators and old battered Leiky.
We need it?
Main question. The question that many of us will face, sooner or later, perhaps after the emptiness stretches into a needle of disappointment disguised as anger that night when we drink too much and build a fire from our negatives or CDs or on what there we store our precious "works". What for? Why do we spend such an inordinate amount of time and effort, thinking about cameras, discussing cameras, operating cameras, buying cameras, selling cameras? Did it lure us into photography first? Usually the reasons were not named or not formed consciously; more often they are simply forgotten.
My first impression of a photo as something in itself happened when I was 10 years old and my father made some prints from a black and white film taken during his trip to America. On these frames were killer whales. I was with him in the dark room, and watched the black-and-white silhouettes slowly appear. I still remember the admiration and the feeling that I should learn this.
A photo
I took this at 12 years old. We were on a school farm trip. I borrowed parent Minolta and took pictures like crazy. The right lens on my glasses had to be replaced, because it was scratched by the viewfinder so that I could not watch it. Then I spent the whole weekend printing, because I was selling prints to the whole class, about 25 cents per card. This is my classmate Tommy in the picture, and the girl's name is Outi ... or not? I can not say from the photo; the name just popped into my head. Maybe the negatives are still somewhere; this is a photograph of a photograph ...
At first, photography is instinctive. Some people are so talented that they need nothing more; only talent and experience. The rest of us will someday have to start consciously working on what we are doing, be it attention to the composition “by the rules”, dissecting the work of our favorite photographers, assigning tasks to ourselves (“one photo a day, every day, with one lens and one type of film; no more, no less ”), joining photo clubs by camera, or sending our work to Photosig. All this starts to pull in the direction of flattery. Most of us give in to her at one moment or another. Some never manage to free themselves from the deceptive shackles of flower macro and smoky girls. And others turn their passion into a profession, and begin to shoot flower macro and smoky girls for money, for clients, also chained in invisible chains of general agreements. And with each click of the shutter, our little character retreats farther and farther into the spider-like nooks of the soul.
But one way or another, many manage to free themselves. They come to the point where they ask themselves the main question. Then they either find some answers and again start taking interesting photos, or throw a photo altogether, or find inspiration in its search.
To ask a question is the key. The answers then have no special meaning.
Art form for all the rest of us
Very few of us have the ability to stick a pencil to paper and to depict something even remotely interesting. My sister can do this. Her boyfriend can do it even better. He is from Australia, Hin Chua . A spark of promethean fire burns brightly in both of them. They do not need a photograph, although in fact they are very good in it.
For a real, zealous artist, photography is a carrier among other carriers. For the rest, this is one of the few ways in which we can get an object of artistic value. Even a completely random snapshot can be interesting, and the technologies are so simple that it takes only a few days to train and instruct to get basic skills of consciously acquiring images. Even this level of technical awareness is completely unnecessary - with modern cameras a simple “brought and clicked” can create a work of art that is as valuable to the last piece as David, painstakingly carved out of marble boulders.
Photography is an art form that is most suitable for us, non-creative people. Of all the arts she produces her works in direct, physical connection with the outside world - and the world itself is interesting. A photographer does not need to be a creative genius to make interesting or artistically valuable objects - he just has to notice all the interesting things happening in the world. What he lacks in genius will be completed by his subjects. All you need to get interesting photos is to go out into the world and take them.
2005 © Petteri Sulonen (text, photo)
2006 © www.x3photo.ru (translated into Russian)
HE
Also recommend
WHY MOST LANDSCAPE IS BORED
IS IT POSSIBLE TO LEARN COMPOSITIONS?
HOW TO REMOVE ON THE STREET
Well, the rest that you find.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/11383/
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