To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me.
If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.
Andrew Wyeth
The most crucial job for a photographer usually takes place in about 1 to 2 minutes. Sometimes it’s a little longer, sometimes it’s seconds or less. If you’re properly acute, to come upon a subject and find the right spot to put the camera usually takes about 1 to 2 minutes, yeah? You take the picture and start the snowball rolling down the hill. Any thing that happens after exposing the film supports – completes - what you did in those first minutes.
Contrast this with a good painter. To properly and convincingly render, say, white flowers by a creek; it takes far longer. If the painter doesn’t paint the water properly – make it wet; and paint the flowers properly full and bright, as well as the black swampy background – the painting fails. You’ve seen poor amateur paintings – the value range is about 3 tones; all textures and surfaces are identical (skin is no different from granite or driftwood), and the colors are muddy and unconvincing. This is “blowing sour notes.”
A good painter is a real artist. If the elements aren’t painted correctly, everyone can see it, just as people cringe when a musical instrument isn’t played well. But the “drawing” in a photograph is automatic. The camera does it. The photographer is only an imaginative observer. Her real work is arranging the subject matter. Printing the eventual negative may require using more or less contrast, yes; but no one can save a vapid image by strenuously printing it. That’s an ignorant and risky notion. Once the film is exposed, that’s pretty much it . . .
Printing is not what photography is all about. People who says that think that spending hours printing one negative makes them equal to an artist who must necessarily spend hours painting or drawing. After all, what kind of a Master Printer are you if it only takes you 20 minutes to print a negative? And what kind of Great Artiste are you if you don’t experiment with all sorts of contrast grades and papers and developers and heaven knows what else? What’s the ultimate Master Printer pretext? - Having a variable contrast enlarger head so that you can apply 5 different contrast grades in one print!
But if the picture is powerful and interesting, the print isn’t really that crucial. Too may photographers believe the opposite; that any commonplace record becomes Art through “The Fine Print,” and that printing is – as Brett Weston said – the ultimate moment of truth.
It’s not. In fact, it’s pretty easy to make a very nice print if the negative is good. Unlike drawing or painting, there are only so many possibilities in photography. There’s no such thing as a “master printer”; there is only handling the materials well, or handling them poorly. If you exaggerate print manipulation too much, it looks fake – like a trick.
[T]ake my big piece that I will play on Sunday—the Schumann ‘Concerto Without Orchestra.’ It is very difficult work, especially the last movement. Anyway, I first read through it. I played a lot of wrong notes. In fact, I played everything wrong, except that I found’ the emotional climate of the piece—l found the spiritual essence. That's what you have to look for first. Once I knew what the music was saying, I went back to the notes, because, of course, the piece must be played correctly. . . .
Vladimir Horowitz, 1975
“Played correctly.” Similarly, expressive photography springs and blossoms from your ability to see. The “emotional climate” of any expressive photograph springs from that - how you see the subject. Not how you print it. The printing is only playing the piece properly. And what about the perfect print?
Always there should be a little mistake here and there—I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. . . . These youngsters who win a competition are like the assembly line. Every trill is so perfect but every one is the same and in 10 minutes you will be bored and go home.
Vladimir Horowitz, 1978
Certainly, the negative must be printed correctly – not too harsh, not too flat. And these are just rules of thumb. I had some snow-on-snow pictures last winter that had very little separation, so I needed the highest contrast paper possible. And sometimes a very soft gray-on-gray print is appropriate. You wouldn’t play the Mozart flute and harp concerto too fast – you’d ruin it. And if played too slow, bebop sounds awful. A print that’s “appropriate” to the subject is all you need. Usually it doesn’t take long to achieve.The best photographers I ever knew hardly ever spoke about technique and printing at all. The questionable ones spoke of nothing else.
But if printing is ultimately so insignificant, why did all the Great photographers stress it so highly? One reason is that they don’t know any better. Another is because it’s easy to talk about. Nuts and bolts are very easy to teach. That happened at RIT a lot. It’s easy to pretend that aggrandizing the form overcomes an ignorance of content. There are signs! If someone says, “this proof is dull, I’ll make it better when I print it” – that’s dangerous. It’s a sure sign that the “I think I’m a painter” master-printer mindset is operating. The west-coast “fine print” isn’t anything profound at all. It’s just the most contrasty print that shows most of the tones.
What’s much more difficult to comprehend and teach is this: understanding visual metaphor in photographs – in depth. Yes it’s there, and it’s possible to see, and it’s possible and necessary to discuss it. If you cannot see visual metaphor and discuss it, then you’re visually illiterate. It’s also very, very rare that someone can do that. At RIT there was 1 teacher who could do it. Of course he was an outcast, the administration looked down on him. But more than a few of us knew how important he was.
Dare I say it? That most photographers are blindly ignorant to the “content” in theirs or anyone else’s work? They overcompensate by stressing the “form,” the printing, the technique.
A real artist must paint grass that “feels” like grass, oak trees that possess mass and solidity, and flesh that’s alive. Doing that requires skill and time. Otherwise the painting fails. A photograph isn’t like that. All the elements already feel like water, trees, and grass. That is photography’s great weakness – photographs look so “ordinary.” So there is only one way to make expressive photographs and that’s to make a subject into something “other” than what was there. You can only do that when you initially See.
That’s why Minor White, Atget, Charles Pratt, Steichen, and much of Caponigro among others; made such interesting pictures – because of their unique ability to see. And that’s why the work of so many photographers isn’t very interesting. The seeing is bland. Fame and notoriety? – irrelevant. Paul Strand was very famous. With unlimited money, he could travel the world and put forth this myth of himself and most everyone swallowed it. But his work reveals nothing remarkable. The pictures are dead looking . If you really look at them, those pictures are simply dressed up records of what was there – commonplace accounts. If you really look, and don’t just listen to what’s been said by “authorities.”
It’s best to forget the “fine print” idea – this worship of the most contrasty print showing all the tones. I’m afraid that most “fine prints” are embellished records of something that wasn’t very interesting in the first place.
What is powerful seeing? It is simply what you intensely and deeply love morphed and remade through what photography can do well. Powerful seeing may be strenuous, or effortless; contemplative, or cheerful; free, or tightly controlled. It must not be concerned with the photography you’re doing; but with whatever you love, and whatever you’re after. That’s hard to do, and to know.
My aim is not to exhibit craft, but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content.
Andrew Wyeth
Of course photographers must discuss and analyze the content of photographs! Writers don’t get together to discuss typewriter ribbons!
Discussion at RIT, 1979