It seems to me that the most damaging restrictions on an artist’s liberty are self-imposed. So often, what may have begun as fresh thinking and discovery is turned into a routine and reduced to mere habit. Habits in thinking or technique are always stultifying in the long run. They are also contagious, and when a certain set of habits becomes general, a whole art period can condemn itself to the loss of freedom.
—Edward Steichen
Previous installments in this series:
- Remembering the Future — Part I: Introduction
- Remembering the Future — Part II: The Future Will Come
- Remembering the Future — Part II: The Future Will Come (cont.)
- Remembering the Future — Part III: The Future is Shaped by the Present
Remembering that the future is shaped by the present means, if nothing else, that if we wish for the future to be in some ways better than the present (whatever our perception of “better” is), we should cease from perpetuating present-day practices that have outlived their usefulness. In other words: we must let go of obsolete traditions.
Traditions are customs or beliefs passed on to us from previous generations. No doubt, some of these are good and useful—and those we should keep and continue to build upon—but throughout history, humanity has had the wisdom and courage to discard and transcend some unhelpful or harmful traditions. Preserving good traditions and eradicating bad ones are indispensable elements of progress.
Alas, we humans like predictability and stability (perhaps a little too much) and fear change, sometimes to our own detriment. Often, traditions are preserved for no other reason than because they arouse nostalgic feelings for or confabulations about past times we may wish to think of as “better days.” Such feelings often go unquestioned. Specifically, we are loath to also question whether these traditions are rationally founded, have proven useful, or perhaps even caused undue harm to some even if cherished by others.
In The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot warns against perpetuating traditions by rote, for no other reason than to comply uncritically with the customs of those who came before us. He wrote, “If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged.”
In The Summing Up, W. Somerset Maugham acknowledged that traditions may be useful, but only if we use them as resources to learn from, not as unexamined authoritative dictates. As he put it, bluntly and succinctly, “Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”
Photographer Al Weber, in his little book of wisdom, Advice for Photographers: The Next Step, admonished, “The sneakiest of obstacles may be Tradition. . . . In this world, that is ever changing at a faster and faster pace, one must constantly be alert regarding traditional practices.” Put another way: we must always consider tradition in light of their fitness to our current world, recognizing that they came about in a world that was at least in some important ways different from the one we live and work in.
~~~
When Alfred Stieglitz came on the photography scene in the late 1800s, the dominant form of photography was Pictorialism. Pictorialist images consisted mostly of pre-arranged scenes photographed and processed to achieve a dreamy, theatrical look. Stieglitz changed that. He and his circle of friends brought about new styles in photography, including what we now call “straight photography,” and which has become the dominant photographic tradition in our day.
Despite common belief, straight photography did not start with Ansel Adams or Edward Weston or any member of Group f/64. It originated and became the dominant style among Stieglitz’s circle in the early 1900s. The first mention of the term “straight photography,” defined ambiguously as avoiding tools and processes that “interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique”—whatever those might be—appears in an article by Sadakichi Hartmann in one of Stieglitz’s publications in 1904. (For context, in 1904 Ansel Adams was 2 years old. Edward Weston hasn’t even learned how to use a camera yet (he started photographing in 1906), and both started their photographic journeys as pictorialists.)
I very much doubt anyone in 1904 would have considered our digital and computerized tools today as possessing “natural qualities of photographic technique” by the standard of their time. Just as important, 1904 was more than 120 years ago, which means that straight photography has had a good run, but is also getting a little “long in the tooth.”
Both art and photography have progressed a long way in 120 years. New styles, traditions, and tools have been invented, and some are slowly becoming more established and widely accepted. We now have Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) photography, various forms of abstract photography, and tools to blend photographs with other photographs or with any other visual media.
Among other things, our tools today make fidelity to realistic appearances almost entirely a matter of choice. People’s misplaced belief in the realism of “straight looking” photographs, which was never entirely justified, is today no longer even something to be encouraged or celebrated, but something to warn and educate the public about lest they be deceived and manipulated by realistic-looking creations. Today more than ever, photographs presented as art should be treated as creations (i.e., not as depictions or as “captures”) and as intended primarily to have an aesthetic, sometimes expressive effect rather than to represent reality. Conversely, photographs presented as reportage—as realistic or as “unmanipulated”—should always be considered critically and skeptically in context of who created them, where they appear, what their intended effect may be, and how much their creators and promoters are to be trusted.
But despite these historical developments (and no matter whether you consider them as good or bad) for some reason, many photographers and photographic institutions still cling to the tradition of straight photography as the one and only “real” or legitimate use for our medium.
What does it say about us as artists that we choose to deprive ourselves of possibilities afforded by our tools, rather than leverage them to expand our powers of artistic expression and to free ourselves of old traditions? What does it say about us as people if we continue to nurture the idea that realistic-looking photographs must be considered as “real” by default, when we know that such trust is no longer justified and may result in unfortunate consequences?
Let’s give photographers of the future the gift of freedom from a tradition that may have served us well but that may no longer be the most appropriate in a future where photographic art is becoming more recognized as a form of personal expression (rather than mimetic depiction), and photographic journalism must meet stricter demands than just “looking real” to be trusted. Let’s give future photographers the freedom to create and to express themselves according to their own values, to meet the needs and demands of their world, and with room to grow in whatever new directions they deem useful, and not force them into our own traditions.
To qualify, no one will deny the importance of straight photography as an eminently important style and tradition in photography, just like no one will deny realism or impressionism as eminently important styles and traditions in painting. But none may claim to be the only, the most important, or the most appropriate style for all times.
~~~
Another tradition in art that has long been abandoned in most art forms but that curiously and persistently continues to plague photography today, is the idea that visual composition and expression may be reduceable to “rules” and to simple recipes. This belief is among the factors responsible for so much sameness and lack of creativity in photography. It is also, in my opinion, one of the greatest hurdles to artistic progress in our medium. All this despite there being no verifiable evidence to support the usefulness or even existence of “rules of composition.”
To make the point, I’ll use one of the most prevalent of these so-called rules: the “Rule of Thirds,” which seem to have an almost religious following among photographers—and ONLY among photographers.
The expression “rule of thirds” was first noted down by English painter and engraver John Thomas Smith in 1797. As the Wikipedia entry for the term states, “even at this early date, there was skepticism over the universality of such a rule.” In reading Thomas’s explanation, it is clear he came up with the rule based on his own aesthetic preference and did not conduct any scientific study or survey to validate his intuition. He even stated that he would welcome feedback on the matter and that at the time he was only committing to using his own rule unless he “shall be better informed.”
One skeptic of the rule of thirds was John Fields, who wrote in 1845, “This rule, however, does not supply a general law, but universalises a particular.” Also, he warned—presciently and correctly—“the invariable observance [of the rule of thirds] would produce a uniform and monotonous practice.”
It’s now been almost 230 years since Mr. Smith came up with the rule of thirds, which raised skepticism among artists at least as far back as the 1840s. Here we are, two centuries later, with absolutely no solid evidence to back up the usefulness of the rule of thirds, yet some photographers still treat it as gospel.
Painters have largely not taken the rule of thirds seriously. As far as I know (please feel free to fact-check me on this) there is not a single academic book about visual composition written for painters in the last century that promotes the rule of thirds. Also, during the past century, a lot of scientific research in psychology and neuroscience has gone into studying visual perception. This science has given us things like the laws of Gestalt , and insights into how the human brain makes meaning from visual information. Being a bit of a science buff, I decided to dig around some databases of scientific studies related to aesthetics and visual perception to see if there are any research papers that might suggest the rule of thirds has some unique aesthetic properties that indeed make it more favorable than other ways of dividing a frame. I could not find even one.
As far as I can tell, the only places you will find the rule of thirds promoted these days, is in the writings and teachings of photographers—and nowhere else. And these photographers, I assume, are repeating things they have learned from other photographers, who probably also learned them from other photographers and did not take the time to research them.
Let’s free future generations of photographers from this and other tropes and rules and old wives’ tales that have no verifiable bases. Let’s also stop critiquing each other’s work based on such rules unless we know of authoritative, verifiable sources to confirm their validity.
And, if you are on the receiving end of critique, and someone tells you that your photograph doesn’t comply or should comply with any so-called rule, ask your critics to back up their claims with verifiable evidence for it.
Better yet, refer your critics to the writings of people who have studied and tried to understand this idea of rules in art. Invariably, you will find that those who historically preached rules of composition had lived and worked in pre-scientific times. Modern critics and historians of art generally hold opinions along these lines, expressed by art historian Ernst Gombrich in his book The Story of Art:
It is true that some artists or critics in certain periods have tried to formulate laws of their art; but it always turned out that poor artists did not achieve anything when trying to apply these laws, while great masters could break them and yet achieve a new kind of harmony no one had thought of before. . . . The truth is that it is impossible to lay down rules of this kind because one can never know in advance what effect the artist may wish to achieve.
Rather than perpetuate the unhelpful and unfounded tradition of teaching or assessing visual composition according to rules, I think that a much better bit of advice we may offer future generations of photographers is, as expressed by Edward Weston, this: “I would say to any artist: ‘Don’t be repressed in your work, dare to experiment, consider any urge, if in a new direction all the better.’”
Continue to Remembering the Future — Part IV: We Can Predict (Some Of) The Future
Wonderful article. And so true about the ‘rules’ in photography, or any art for that matter.
Thank you, Judy!