This notion of “never been done” bothers me. Nobody has ever made a photo that is identical to another photo. Something will always be different, though not necessarily in a good way.
Finding the best spot to manage foreground and background, or to be “different”, is a matter of technique. But what makes photos unique is not technique (which is a bitter pill for me to swallow, to be honest). It’s about expression.
But, to express something of any relevance, we have to feel something. And to feel something, we have to be open to those feelings. Here’s where the snap shooter runs into problems—they only thing they feel is the need to demonstrate that they were there (which dominates the expressions I see these days), or that they know how to make photos, or they have great equipment (super-telephoto, super-wide, super-format, whatever), or that their kids or pets are cute.
When I’m in the presence of a powerful natural scene, I feel awe, and admiration for the Creator (or, with the constructed scene, the creator), and humility. How to express those feelings? That’s where craft comes in.
Maybe what strikes me is the simply beautiful symmetry, or the sense of height, or simple reverence. Or, maybe the scene brings me joy, or melancholy, or deep outrage. The art is in manipulating craft to deliver those emotions efficiently, without any contradictory clutter. If the scene is powerful enough, we may just need to stay out of its way—any manipulation distracts from that power and undermines awe. Maybe we need to consider what makes it awe-inspiring. Adams describes his decision to use a red filter to darken the sky to emphasize the contrast between the rim-lit Half Dome and the sky, which was the key to the drama of that scene, and his feelings about it.
He describes this as the first photo he made that demonstrated artistic intent.
But we have to have feelings to deliver first, before any amount of technique can deliver them.
If we tune into those relationships, it won’t matter if we stand at the same place as someone else. It won’t even matter if we express the same feeling someone else expressed. That’s a matter of editing, not art-making.
My beef with current photography is that the only feelings considered relevant are cynicism, sadness and outrage. Joy, awe and humility in the presence of dramatic (or simple) beauty seem to be considered untrustworthy, too easily contrived, or too sentimental. They are too much like calendar photos, and the current thinking seems to be that everything about those feelings is unsophisticated and has already been expressed. Artists are expected to be tortured. But those feelings are still important to me, so my photos express them.
But we can also be trapped by technique, relying on specific technical manipulations out of habit rather than purpose. In those cases, we look for camera locations that fit the technical manipulation we want to make, and the divergence from our feelings only increases. The technique becomes a gimmick, and distracting rather than contributory.
Adams complained about sharp photos of fuzzy concepts.
Rick “cataloguing his own weaknesses” Denney