Here’s to the snapshot (beware: long read!)

[Hertz van Rental]

This is a false dichotomy, set up to make the argument. There aren't two groups, there is the entire continuum of people who are interested in photography as a technical exercise through people who are interested in pictures and subordinate the technical issues to people who are interested in only content-specific pictures. Those who see photography as part of continuum of communication approach photography along a completely different axis.

If there is a 'continuum of people' who see 'photography as a technical exercise' at one end and 'people who are interested in onl content-specific pictures' at the other then at some point on that scale there must be a cross-over point. At this point you can make a rough division into two 'groups': those who put the emphasis on the technical side and those who put the emphasis on content.
This was all I was saying and you have basically restated it in a different form.
Both views are broad generalisations made soleley for ease of argument and neither truly represent the real situation. But then, nothing ever does.

This particularly is a generalization without any basis, that I challenge you to attempt to prove.

You proved it yourself:
"I shall print this thread, run it through a shredder and sprinkle it on my lawn."
In this thread we have been doing nothing more than theorising about certain aspects of Photography as some of us see it. Such exercises are merely the interchange of ideas in order to clarify our ideas and the way we see things. Nothing more. And we can be wrong just as easily as we can be right.
But rather than making an intelligent response raising questions and arguing your point in a mature way, you chose to make that comment which can only translate as that you consider all that has been written in this thread as potential lawn food.
Or, to put it simply, that statement implies you think this thread is bullsh*t.
I think that answers your challenge.
And if you disagree with a thread but make silly comments and then keep coming back to throw down juvenile challenges* then I can only draw the conclusion that you are doing it for personal reasons and are not in the least interested in moving this thread and it's ideas forward.



*No one can actually 'prove' anything - even in Science. It is just a matter of the 'best-fit' theory.

 

[The_Traveler]

No I don't think, in general, that anything beyond technology is airy fairy nonsense, I was expressing my opinion of what you said.

 

[mysteryscribe]

Well let me jump in here and be the voice of non reason. Story from the past. As most of you know My first formal photography instruction was from a youngish woman named Barbara. You also know Barbara was a frustrated painter. Now Barbara was of the opinion that photography was all about high art. It was a medium searching for an audience. You were either a great artist (no idea the definition of that) or you were something else. She was all philosophical about art in general. All about how it was more than it was. I never really got it because I couldn't see her vision. She taught technique and managed to even teach me to love photography, but she never made me understand the higher plane stuff.

Then there was my third ex wife. Her opinion was, "Okay, you have to really do a good job for the people who pay you. If not your business will dry up. I understand that, but why do you give a darn about the things you do as gifts. Nobody knows the difference." She would have made a great soccer mom for the Nikon D40 advertisement.

Now for me Photography attitudes are like a bell curve. Heavily weighted toward the bottom. Soccer Mom with her D40 anchoring the bottom and Barbara and Hertz on the other end with me sliding up and down the curve.

As Barbara said to me, "Hon you ain't never going to be an artist so start looking for way to join the merchantile world of photography." She must have been right.

 

[The_Traveler]

This discussion is attempting to cast photography as a closed problem dealing with communication where all the factors can be known and we have only to name them, assign them their weights and we can understand their interaction.

IMO, it is far from that because positing that a linguistic structure is necessary to understand interactions assumes in advance that all the methods and means of interaction are known and they must be merely named and related. A 'language' doesn't explain the motivations or behaviors of many groups; e.g. the people who seem to love photography, get very involved and yet are in actuality virtually uninvolved with the subject matter. - as long as the subject fits certain parameters, they are concerned only with the perfect reproduction of it. This group of people lie along the continuum next to, and may intersect, with those people who absolutely love 'stuff' - lenses, cameras, every piece of exotic paraphernalia they can get. Yet each of these groups has people who fit to some degree into every other group that one can name along any 'continuum.'

Additionally, each of these groups has their own equivalent in many other fields, small groups of adherents whose emotions resound to things that others may not understand - and even don't seem to make sense within the contxt of the field itself. My son-in-law is a fine craftsman, but uses the cheapest tools he can find to do the job while my brother-in-law is an equally fine luthier who both uses - and loves tools to distraction. Is the loving of tools part of woodcrafting? We all love form in sport - separately from the actual achievement. We have even made form part of the issue - as in ice skating or ballet. Can one say that the emotional impact of ballet is fundamentally different from the frisson one gets when looking at a good picture? When we see Tiger Wood swing, what part of our appreciation is based on the actual beauty of the action and what part is based on knowing that he is actually so good. What if the viewer knows nothing about golf?

There are communications going on here and in all interactions that are unnameable and undefinable in any usable sense. Why does a Nikon feel better to me than a Canon? Naming the feeling doesn't define it.

I pick up a box of photos and the top one is of my dead brother and me when we were kids. The paper is old and musty and as I pick up the box, the print slides to one side and disappears and I feel loss. Is this language? Can you tell me which of the interactions - the sight of the picture, the content, memory, sadness, smell and its associations - are the important parts in my reaction and their relative weights?

My general point being is that there are so many interactions made between any individual and any object or activity, that trying to piece them out and label them as language or communication - is a exercise that requires ignoring much of what one can't know.

 

[Mike_E]

:lmao::lmao:

Traveler, Hertz shot that one down a while back, although that was never what I intended.

What I was looking for is a more formalized way of discussing how best to trigger emotions and specific thoughts in a person viewing a photograph. If you like, how to Best craft a photograph for the purpose of artistic impact. The use of "The language of a photograph" was (is) to serve as a primer for learning, understanding and hopefully mastering the Art of photography. Or at least that was my desire, it would have probably been better to have started a new thread to keep down some of this confusion. Thanks for everyones input thus far and in future.

mike