Thoughts, Feelings and Photography

[helenjune]

This image may speak to your emotions, but the image isn't created out of your emotion, it is created out of the existance of what is already there. Photography is often simply a form of reporting, recording, or documentation. Photography on a secondary level is about interpretation.

I feel like this really speaks to me.

Perhaps I don't create things with my emotion because emotion isn't mine to command, or anyones, for that matter. The most I can do is try to understand it, but in the end, I am a channel and a filter through which the world communicates itself. And that can be linked to what I was talking about in regards to vulnerability, because your level of vulnerability to the world influences how much of it is able to be expressed through you.

So, maybe that's one of the mistakes I've been making without even realising - that I've been trying to imbue other subjects with emotion instead of allowing them to communicate their own. I think it's very possible that I'm being too narrow minded and shut off to the world, by trying too hard to mould it into what I believe it should be, instead of allowing it to be what it is and looking a little deeper under the surface to reveal the part of it that is important to me.

 

[The_Traveler]

helenjune,

I've read all of this thread and my belief is that you are over-thinking this issue.
I don't think you can create emotion in pictures any more than you can force yourself to be in love.

I like to photograph demonstrations because of the raw emotion and life on display there. Then it is my task to somehow capture the scene in a way that emotion is actually represented in the picture.

There is no way to 'think' that through.
I've learned the mechanical processes of how to take the pictures, where to stand, how to use the light, etc but the actual composition and the framing comes from making hundreds, perhaps thousands, of not-quite-right pictures until I somehow understand, in a non-verbal way, how I want to show what I see.
It is like learning to ride a bicycle, a combining of basic knowledge and attaining a certain level of muscular skill so that the mechanics of actually riding the bicycle don't get in the way of 'riding.'

 

[helenjune]

Traveler

Why do you believe that I am over-thinking?

I don't think you can create emotion in pictures any more than you can force yourself to be in love.

No, I don't suppose I am talking about creating emotions anymore. It does seem like some kind of an error, and I just about said as much in my last post.

 

[The_Traveler]

Well, you've written 1500 words about 'Thoughts, Feelings and Photography.'

My intuition is, since I've not seen any of your pictures, that you have as yet no personal artistic view and so probably your pictures are ping-ponging around ending up as reproductions of things without much individual artistic insight.

I don't think this is uncommon.

Many photographers, even dedicated hobbyists and many pros, just shoot what is in front of them without an personal take on it.

I shot for years, wondering what I was doing, until I developed a style that I was happy with, that generally expressed how I saw things in my mind's eye.

I'm not claiming that I am a 'great' or even 'good' photographer (many unspoken 'that's right' from the unseen audience) but I am pretty confident thta my pictures reflect how I see the subjects and I think it comes through.to other people also.

That did not result from talking with others but from years of taking pictures until the mechanical part wasn't a barrier and I could take the pictures I wanted to take.

Learning what I wanted to take and how I wanted to do it came from within and not from any discussion with anyone; it was an unvoiced desire, inexpressible except in pictures.

 

[helenjune]

For me, a large thing that compels me to create is in the need to communicate thoughts, feelings, concepts, and ideals that exist in my own mind. Not just through photography, but through any medium that best suits what I need to express. I don't think I'm trying to think the emotion into a photograph so much as I'm just trying to understand myself, my mind, in relation to creativity.

Well, you've written 1500 words about 'Thoughts, Feelings and Photography.'

Learning what I wanted to take and how I wanted to do it came from within and not from any discussion with anyone; it was an unvoiced desire, inexpressible except in pictures.

I don't feel like the amount of words I have written or what I am writing about, are conducive to me over-thinking things. If you feel that the things I am writing here don't have much relevancy to you in your life, that's fine, but for me - communicating with myself and with others about things that I think are important, is just another aspect of learning for me.

I sincerely appreciate your input though, I'll keep your opinion in mind.

And also

My intuition is, since I've not seen any of your pictures, that you have as yet no personal artistic view and so probably your pictures are ping-ponging around ending up as reproductions of things without much individual artistic insight.

You know, I think you're absolutely right! suppose I feel like that's what I'm fighting against.

 

[helenjune]

Hmm, I'm truly interested by that last thing I quoted from you, Traveler.

What exactly do you mean by "personal artistic view"? I'm just asking because I realise you could be meaning it differently to what I am thinking. Also, if you wouldn't mind sharing, what would you say that your own personal artistic view is?

 

[The_Traveler]

I can't express my 'artistic view' in words because it is inextricably intertwined with my persona and so I don't have the best viewpoint.

Talking about artistic vision is like talking about sex; no amount of words can convey the real experience, it is much more satisfying to have it than to talk about it and it is not as meaningful to anyone not actually involved.

Post pictures.

 

[pgriz]

The thing we haven't yet discussed is that as humans, we process stimuli and create mental objects which we then process again to extract relationships, causality, and ultimately meaning. While it's true that the eye "sees", it's the brain that assembles what we see into a meaningful image. Part of the processing that happens, is the matching up of stimuli to learned collection of objects and elements. This latter process is partly influenced by our expectations, our cultural conditioning, and our experiences. We tend to see what we expect to see, something that illusioniststake advantage of. You may also be familiar with the drawing that can be seen as a young woman, or an old woman at the same time (http://www.moillusions.com/2006/05/young-lady-or-old-hag.html). One sees one or the other (in the same image), and it takes effort to see the other variation. However once seen, you can flip back and forth between the two interpretations of the same image.

Evoking emotion through a visual medium usually requires us to access the emotional connections we all have with certain objects and entities (which are not the same for each person). The marketing industry takes advantage of that by learning which images (or even elements) evoke roughly similar responses in a wide selection of people. Use this too much, and we get into clichés. Part of the difficulty in coming up with interesting and satisfying images is that too often we tend to reproduce the cultural clichés we have absorbed, and it is not a simple matter to set these aside to see something without preconditions and expectations. In the book "Drawing with the right side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards, there is a whole process of learning to draw by deliberately avoiding the visual shorthands we all use, and deconstruct the image we see into its elements. Once the learned shorthands are abandoned, the quality of the drawings improves. I suspect the same is true of photography. You mentioned in your first post that your early images were more "free" while now you seem to have "pretty but boring" pictures (forgive me if I have misintereted your post). That can be a consequence of your earlier vision being unfettered by what you've learned since then.

My wife is an artist, and she constantly struggles with "seeing" what is there compared to "recognizing" what is there. For example, she would "see" a ceramic object of roughly cylindrical shape, with various textures and pigments, and surface indentations, which she would "recognize" as a coffee cup. But to show that specific object, she has to suppress her knowledge of what a coffee cup "should" look like. Same problem with doing figure drawings - we know that there is a torso, and various appendages coming out of it, and certain relationships between the elements. But to REALLY show the essense of the figure, she has to forget all that and concentrate of what she sees, not what she knows is there. As a photographer, I've been working on similar approaches - trying to see a scene or image in terms of elements while deliberately suppressing my knowledge of what that scene or those elements are. It ain't easy. Yet if one can step outside the boundaries of what we expect to see, we start seeing things in a fresh and interesting way.

Edit: two discussions of visual perception may be relevant to this thread: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC10220/visper03.html, and http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC10220/visper06.html