Lately I find myself wondering whether I would have spent so much money, time and attention on photography if I could paint to express my vision. Or putting it another way, if it were possible, would I be willing to trade all the photographic equipment I now own and have ever owned for the ability to paint pictures to a standard comparable to my photographs?

The embarrassing fact is that even at the age of seven my daughter could sketch and paint far better than I could, 40 years her senior. It's always been a source of frustration for me that while I'm moved and inspired by what my eyes see, my hand can't even begin to express that vision.

So discovering photography in my mid-20s turned out to be a wondering surprise. I found that I could produce images that went some way towards satisfying the urge to express my vision - my way of seeing things. I splashed out on cameras, lenses and darkroom equipment and spent a load of times immersed in it all. Then along came family.

Then along came digital. And I'm now busily exploring the possibilities, and delighting in the even greater range of cameras, lenses, computers, software and output devices. The investment runs to many thousands of pounds, plus a lot of time learning how to use each of the different bits of kit. In my local photo group, even those with the simplest of equipment still use more than a moonshot's-worth of processing power to produce their images.



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Disclaimer

This musing is intended purely as a reflection on ways of expressing one's vision.

This has nothing to do with the relative merits of photography and painting in creating works of art.

It is not about commercial photography - clearly commercial photographers need to produce images quickly and in large volumes, and be able to process them

Stuarte, Don't let that get you down. If you check out a museum with a display of kids' paintings you'll probably discover that most seven-year-olds can sketch and paint better than most 47-year-olds. The difference is that most kids just draw or paint what they want to draw or paint. They haven't yet learned what's the "right" stuff to paint, and they haven't yet been stunted by learning the rules.

Stuarte: I got into photography originally, at least in large part because I couldn't draw or paint to my own satisfaction. Thirty-five years later, I don't know that I'd give up photography even if I could paint as you describe. Photography to me represents a different way of seeing as much as different way of recording what I see. Painting is additive - one starts with a blank page and adds the scene. Photography is subtractive - one starts with the scene 'as is', and then through lighting, composition, depth of field, etc. removes those elements that aren't to be included.

Mike.

My father in law painted brilliantly from 1936 until 1992, but he also owned several cameras and left behind about 10,000 negatives and slides of all sizes. His first interest was painting, but he saw photography as a good way to record many things - family, paintings, scenes for later perusal, many others.

It would take a thick book to express this properly, but in a few words...

Painting and photography are apples & oranges. What painting reveals is about arrangements of color and tonality and geometry. For many artists the subject of the painting is almost irrelevant, what matters is what emerges in the process of creating the canvas. In the best of paintings what emerges may be stunning and illuminating, but more often than not it's all about technique and pedantry (not that photography is much different). In the end painting is about the process of transforming a subject into something else that may or may not have anything to do with physical subject.

In my youth I was a natural painter, almost a prodigy. But when I discovered that photography could capture the world in a literal sense I was hooked. My visual cortex couldn't get enough of all that imagery. Photography was electrifying to my hormonally enhanced youthful view of the world, and it looks like I'm still stuck with it minus the hormones.

So I'm too literal to want to paint. Although many of my viewers have asked me whether my images are paintings or photographs.

But I like to look at good painting, and I admire the tiny percentage of artists who can do it well. But bottom line...an awful painting and an awful photograph have a lot in common.

Hi Stuarte. My experience has been different. While I had a darkroom as a teenager, I gave it up when I moved out of home. Still kept photographing with a little Rollei 35, but it was not the same as using an SLR.
Some fifteen years ago, following a series of dreams, I took painting lessons and found I could paint and do it well. While I enjoyed using oils and chalk, the problem arose when I realised I had potential. To cut a long story short, the process of practising and training while also having a full time job as a musician, which also gave me meaning and the opportunity for expression, proved much too stressful and so I gave it up. The coming of digital was an immediate revelation. In the time it took previously to set up an easel and prepare the media, I could have the structure of a photograph finished and be working on the small details of light and texture . If I had half an hour free between students, I could carry on working with it on my laptop. No more packing up because the light was going. No more dust everywhere and using toxic materials like cadmium. I could enjoy being out in the countryside in any weather and then be working on the image later in the comfort and warmth of my home.
I think underpinning much of our work is the need to be creative. Looking at a recent exhibition of painting and photography, the question often came up “why did they bother?” Well, much of the work may not have been very good, but the answer to the question lay in in the artist's heart's desire to be creative and their love of the process of doing it.
Expressing our vision, what we see in our hearts, exercising and nurturing our creativity and skills, these are things close to what it is to be a human being and so will give us much grief because we care about what we are doing. Yes, I have found photography ruinously expensive, but some of the images I have now please me. Deeply.
Best wishes, David

I feel just the same, but then I couldn't put together a recognisable sketch if my life depended on it. I think I'd carry on with photography if I suddenly acquired the ability to paint, but then I vehemently maintain that I'd carry on with my rather taxing, stressful day job (which I love) if I won the lottery.

Who knows?

Jeremy

I came to the identical conclusion. As an academy of fine arts student I've been taught to draw, paint and photograph, but apart from similarities, I find them to be completly different methods of artistic expression, "additive" and "substractive" is a perfect description. I think that in early times photography had tried to mimic painting, but after a short time it went it's own way.

On the other way I would encourage everyone to experiment with paints - just for fun and pleasure. It's not as hard as it looks in the beginning, and we can achieve some effects we would never achieve in photography - in oil painting the colours are so clean and vivid, and we have the ability to create three dimensional textures. There's also some primal experience to have contact with paint and leave the trace on the canvas. After my studies I stopped active painting, but I still like to paint something from time to time just to open my painbox, touch, mix the paint and smell the scent of turpentine...

Tell you what, come over to Spain and you can have the distinct pleasure of applying the varnish to all the bleedin´ wooden shutters that looked beautiful when I bought them but have driven me to despair every year since; you will be able to sniff all the turps that you crave. The older I get the larger and more heavy they seem to become.

Seriously, though, you are right: painting is visceral but photography is not.

Rob C

Rob, I don't agree and neither did HCB. If you can find a copy of The Mind's Eye, you'd probably find the first half of the book a good read. The fact that most people don't understand that photography has to be visceral in order to be good helps to explain why I see so much dreadful photography around.

I'm intrigued by the use of "visceral" in the two posts above. "Coming from the gut" is my understanding of the word.

I think with the best of my photos - those I like the best, at least - they either come from or prompt a quickening of the heart/spirit. I can relate to a kind of fluttering excitement in and around the solar plexus area when some really right is happening in a conversation or an interaction; we're touching on something true and important.

Feelings more visceral than that - lower down the abdomen - are connected with fear and anxiety in me. I've even had some health issues in that area.

Painting and drawing aren't mutually exclusive. For me painting and photography both help me see the world better.

The good thing about the two is that you can photograph during the day and paint at night.

I use my photography as a reference for my paintings. The interesting thing is that selecting photographs for painting isn't obvious. Photographs that look good don't always make good paintings. Painting from simple photos can sometimes be very difficult as you have to introduce fictions to explain things as the images get larger. Painting from complicated photographs can be quite abstract as you have to invent was of representing complex details in a simple way.

As to HCB he was trained as an artist and went back to painting and drawing in his later years.

Cheers,

This is not the place for discussing sexual hang-ups. This is the place for discussing sexual hang-ups. How lo can you go and remain visceral?

Rob C

Well, Russ, perhaps I was being slightly extreme there - but if photography is visceral, then possibly at the tripping of the shutter it is and, at a slight stretch, when deciding that a print is ready to be pulled from the dish.

Never in a month of Sundays at the computer. Why? Because there is simply too much time taken and able to be taken over looking, tweaking, going back, changing this, changing that and then even going back to square one. There is not the moment when the mind yells Yes!, it mutters only not bad, getting there, great for now but I can change it later, or similar. In essence: no decisive moments!

The trouble with extrapolating to the point where you associate much bad photography with lack of visceral feeling is that maybe other people´s visceral emotion leads them exactly to the point where the poor photo is made! No accounting for another´s gut instinct!

Rob C

Make your mind up Rob - is it or isn't it the place for discussing sexual hang-ups?

Visceral = intestina/guts. One down from that is inguinal - not what I was referring to, as well you know you mischief maker.

This is an often stated view. However, there has to be doubt as to whether it is really a positive statement or otherwise.

In the case of landscape, it can be either that you learn to see the world as a better place than you had imagined or, regrettably, as the opposite: a place ravaged by the influence of man. Or perhaps tom b means neither, more that painting/photography offer a means/need for observation.

Regarding people photography, all I can really say after spending my life in pursuit of the beautiful is this: there is one hell of a lot more neutral than either beautiful or ugly, and of the latter two, the beautiful are very much in the minority. Would I have been happier not knowing this? Would not having looked that carefully be a less painful or discouraging experience? I can only offer more questions on this and certainly no definitive (for me) answers.

Rob C

Stuart, were I still on speaking terms with Kinsey, Krafft-Ebing et al I might be able to answer or simply make up my mind. Alas, I have to leave it as gut emotion sans mental certification one way or the other.

;-)

Rob C

Rob,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." If you believe Keats was right, that leaves a lot of room for things other than what the eye, on first glance, reports as "beauty." Is this little girl beautiful? She's growing up in Vietnam in 1965. The war is going on all around her and, I think, her expression reflects the uncertainty in her life. Is this face, with its reflection of uncertainty "neutral," beautiful or ugly? I'd opt for beautiful because that little face tells me something important. I can't tell you what it is because I can't put it into words, but my soul knows.

Click to view attachment

I don't know, Rob. I spent a lot of time in darkrooms, pulling prints from the dish, and I can't really see much difference between that and what happens on the computer. Given a fully equipped darkroom and enough time, I'd venture to say you can do just about anything to a photograph you can do with Photoshop. I don't think either darkroom work or computer work ever is visceral. It's mostly grunt work. The visceral part comes at the moment you recognize that "what's before me is a picture!" If it's your mind telling you that, it's likely that what you'll produce will be either pretty junk or an academic art school exercise. But if it's your gut telling you "for god's sake, shoot now!, you may get lucky and produce something worthwhile.

Fair enough, Russ, but that wasn´t my experience of darkroom work, at least, not of the stuff that I really wanted to shoot.

And as importantly, before computers there wasn´t this urge to go on and on until one lost sight of the original shot. Other than some oddballs who might have derived a perverse masochistic pleaure from the above, making b/w prints - at least in fashion - was never about extracting the very last ounce of detail out of a corner or edge of a garment - it was - for me - all about catching the mood. If you wanted the other, you could always shoot a material swatch, no model required. And that mood just leaped out of the dish and kissed you when it was there. Of course, one was a lot younger at the time; I remember having to be very careful around mirrors - they had a tendency to leap at me too.

Frankly, the same dedication to nth degree control is what I think has ruined much of the girl photography that currently goes under the name of glamour, a title I hate, not least because its present connotations spell anything but glamour for me. Glamour was, as I might have mentioned before, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Susan Hayward and, obviously, the era before their time too. As with my Golden Age, it all started to go wrong mid-sixties with the crass displacing the class. As with that other term for bright, breezy, happy which I dare not print in case I get struck off - the word has been hi-jacked, stolen, perverted and generally corrupted beyond recognition.

But I certainly didn´t look on darkroom work as "grunt work" at all - it was the ultimate step between the idea and the fact. And the cheque later did no harm either, if one must be totally realistic...

Ciao

Rob C

Well, I'll have to admit that it was grunt work I enjoyed. Had I not enjoyed it, I'd not have done it. But as far as I'm concerned the creative part of the whole process takes place when you release the shutter. If I'd had the support structure HCB had I'd probably have turned over my film for someone else to print, as he did. Of course I never did much studio work, bit I did enough to know that was a different story.



This is what I've been preaching against on User Critiques ever since I discovered LLS. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to do more than a bit of sharpening and possibly a small color shift if the lighting was difficult, then you've blown the shot, and it doesn't really belong on the web. To me, routine cropping indicates the work of a novice. It particularly galls me to see someone take a perfectly good photograph and make drastic changes in Photoshop in order to create "drama." If the drama wasn't there the moment you tripped the shutter, no amount of Photoshopping is going to introduce real drama. What the Photoshopping usually introduces instead of drama is fabrication for anyone with eyes to see.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced the computer has made that much difference. There were people who went on and on in the darkroom too -- especially in pictorialism's heyday. Seems to me the only real difference is that with a computer you don't have to do all that messy wet work and cleaning up.

The real advantage of digital photography and Photoshop is the undo button. Ah, the number of times that I have wanted an undo key when I am painting. Quite often a history palette would be useful too.

One other major problem is that when you paint you only create one painting. If you sell a painting it is gone forever. You can't click the print button and make another identical painting.

The last thing that is challenging about painting is the battle between real and imagined tones. The painting that I am working on at the moment has a wave washing over a rock late afternoon. I started painting the wash and kept having to increase the tone. I used the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to pick up the colour. It is so much darker that the white water my brain interprets it as being.

Click to view attachment

Cheers,

Shortly before he passed on, my dear old dad said to me "I don't see the usefulness of computers - what can they do we didn't already do before that?" It's really difficult to believe people still ponder these questions. I mean, "....it doesn't belong on the web" ?? The Web is the storehouse of computer creations. I'm sure there's a valid point in there somewhere, but it's surrounded by so many absolutes that it's difficult to find.

Try to fix spherical aberration in a darkroom...or adjust perspective...or substitute one color for another, but only that color and nothing else...in fifteen seconds.

Painting and photography are radically different; their only common ground is that they're visual. However, people who say they can't draw usually haven't tried hard enough -- most drawing professors will tell you that if you can write sentence with a pencil, you can learn to draw quite well indeed. But it takes persistence and practice and you have to go through quite a bit of time when you're bad at it. A famous artist, Jim Dine, decided after he was already famoius that he didn't draw well enough, and took several years off to learn...and it took him several years to get where he wanted to go. It's like playing the piano -- you're not a good piano player after two weeks of lessons. And that's not necessarily true with a camera. If you give somebody a camera, and two week's worth of lessons (say, a two-week workshop at Santa Fe), that person could probably take a credible photograph, in the technical sense. That doesn't make him Ansel Adams, but, unlike other art forms, the technical aspects of camera use are pretty easy to get.

As for great drawings by children, what you usually have is great drawings by children. If you think your kid has a great talent (and I can assure you that he/she doesn't,) ask him/her to draw an accurate picture of a simple pine cone. Won't be able to do it. That's why drawings by children usually aren't found in museums.

I think it's important to distinguish between facility and talent -- facility is pretty much a matter of eye-hand coordination, and some people have quite a good facility, and some children are better at it than other children. They are not necessarily talented, because talent involves a whole complex of learned qualities, plus a cultivated way of looking at the world. Cezanne was one of the world's great artists -- a great talent -- but didn't draw as well as many contemporaries who were not nearly as talented, possibly because he didn't care about it enough. He didn't have an easy facility, but he did have a great talent.

The fact that a child can sometimes draw better than an older person need not be particularly surprising -- probably the kid practiced more. That's usually the case. If you look at most "prodigies," the thing that really distinguishes them is that they began working very hard at their skill at a very young age. (Tiger Woods, Mozart, etc.) I think one of the greatest gifts you can give a kid is that when they show a particular ability, in which they are interested, to then go out of your way to really *appreciate* what they're doing. The more approval they get for a particular activity, the more they're likely to work at it, and the better they'll get compared to their peers, and this can snowball into real talent; of they eventually go in a different direction, it can nevertheless remain an interesting and serious pasttime for the rest of the kid's life.

John, I didn't say you could do it fast. I said you could do it. Yes, there are some lens problems you can't deal with in a darkroom, but I said "almost." Reminds me of the story about the art director who told his employee, who was late with an assignment: "I didn't say I wanted it to be good. I said I wanted it by Thursday."



Well, I agree that almost anyone can learn to draw with enough practice. I did it, and I'm as klutzy with a pencil as anyone around. I don't agree about photography. Superficially, what you're saying is true, and most of what I see on User Critiques are those "credible" photographs you're talking about. You're right. The technical aspects are pretty basic and easy to master, but although you have to master the technical aspects to make fine photographs, the technical aspects are not what make photographs that reasonably can be called art.



Depends on what you mean by "better." What I was talking about earlier is the kind of fresh vision you see in kids' art work. Yes, some museums do hang kids' work. I know of at least two -- one in Florida, the other in Colorado. True, the stuff doesn't stay up long, but when a bunch of the other stuff in the museum is the kind of self-conscious, self-absorbed "art" being hung nowadays, the kids' stuff can be much more interesting than the "adult" stuff.

Of course, it always depends on what you mean by better. But much of what is produced and shown as adult art isn't very good. I read somewhere that during the period of roughly 1860 to 1900 there were 25,000 practicing professional artists in Paris. I doubt that anyone other than an art historian could name more than 50 or 100. That's because most of the "art" was junk, as it still is, and probably always was. Historians write about how somebody like Michelangelo was the outstanding pupil in so-and-so's studio, which leaves open the question, what happened to the others? Well, the others weren't very good, even though they were genuine "renaissance painters," and so disappeared.

I have no problems with kids working at art, producing it, having it hung around, admired and praised, I just don't think it's great, or even very good (as art.) It's kid's art. It might lead to something serious, but probably not. Sounds cynical, but it's really just statistics.

JC

John,

I heartily agree with everything you just said. Children's art is interesting because it's fresh and free. But children haven't the life experiences that translate into work that gives you the transcendental flash essential to what I'd call "fine art." Then there are the "artists" you mentioned who have neither the unconstrained approach of a child nor the informed but intuitive approach of a master. 25,000 is a statistic I hadn't run across, but it's fascinating to think of it. That group included the artists who were supported by the French art establishment at the same time that establishment was turning up its nose at the Impressionists. I said it earlier on one of these threads and I'll say it again: Time is the filter that ultimately defines art.

I don't aspire to be an artist. Fortunately that still leaves room for being creative - for thinking, saying and doing things that surprise and delight me.

My point isn't about the relative merits of photography and painting/drawing. Rather, it's about expressing one's vision. I don't aspire to create art but I do aspire to express my vision - my way of seeing things. Part of the urge to do so is that seeking to express my vision quickens my spirit and makes me engage more with life.

I can only imagine what it would be like to express my vision through paints/pencils etc because I have never taken the time, and now don't have the time, to develop any technical competence. So for the moment, I do what expressing I can through photography.

All very convincingly written, chaps, but I cannot accept that "anyone" can learn to draw, paint or photograph well just by dint of repeated attempts.

Of the three, I´d say that photography is the easy option and, in practice, sheer technique has saved the day for me when given a lousy model and absolutely hideous clothes. The ability to light the thing, focus, shoot and print it has been enough. But was it good, did it approach any artistic level at all? Nope. Just a technically good image.

Perhaps it´s what we are all saying, in different ways, that if you want art then technique is not enough. If I may step back to the Impressionists or Post-Impressionists, depending on whose graduated scale you select, I really wonder how much of it is technique, lack of it or simply the attraction - or even revulsion - of the (then) new. One of my favourites is old Vincent; would he be a great artist? I find it difficult to say yes and as difficult to deny him the mantle. But, he had something which has become something other than his work, something created over and above it by myth, other people´s writings and, eventually, our own expectations. Perhaps the child, whose innocence we sought as progidy, might be the better critic, the true analyst.

Rob C

I once asked some jazz musicians in Santa Barbara how they can sit down with people they haven't played with before, and jump right in to a difficult tune and pull it off convincingly. They said "It's a language - once you learn it, you just converse with the other musicians. A different tune is just a different topic, but all part of the conversation."

Rob, I don't think anyone's saying you can learn to draw or paint well just by dint of hard work. I can draw, and I learned to do that by hard work. But I can't say I learned to draw "well." I haven't done it for a long time now. I always loved photography and I guess I can say I've always been serious about my photography, but though my drawing resulted in some pretty fair woodcuts, drawing always was purely for fun. I never really took it seriously.

I understand what you're saying about studio photography. My pro friends both say the same thing you're saying, and then they say: "I wish I could do what you do and just go out and shoot what I want to shoot." But they can't, because they need to feed their families, and you can't make a buck doing what I do in photography. Oh, I sell prints all right, but what I end up netting is pocket change. I'm sure that at least one of those friends is quite capable of producing serious photographic art, but he has to do weddings instead. What do weddings require? They require Cliches. Brides don't want anything "different." They want what they see in their married friends' wedding albums.

And, yes, I think what we're all saying is, if you want art, technique is not enough. On the other hand, technique is essential. As I've said before, during the ten years my wife had her gallery I saw an awful lot of "art" by people who succeeded in the inspiration department but failed because they never bothered to learn the technique necessary to give wings to their inspiration. I think you can learn photographic technique -- and I'm not talking about f stops and shutter speeds now -- by spending a lot of time looking at the work of the masters. But when it comes to making art, you're pretty much on your own.

Not all brides want cliches. Have you seen the work of John Michael Cooper:

http://trashthedress.wordpress.com/2007/06...el-cooper-alt-f

http://altf.com

Like all endeavors some people will find a way to show their artistic vision.

Cheers,

Some interesting shots, Tom, but I´d suggest it depends more on the couple than the photographer, not the actual photography but the location/treatment possibility.

In the UK I haven´t seen many Cadillac-in-the-desert shots, mainly Rolls-Royce in the hotel gardens ones...

Rob C

I recently realised that one thing I value about photography is being able to gain different perspectives on the world around me as it is, rather than "making it up" with paints. Sometimes - maybe even usually - something surreal or unusual emerges from a photo as I'm looking at it later. It may be part of a photo, or the whole thing. Who knows whetherI actually noticed it at any level when I took the photo. Maybe I did notice something unconsciously.

So amid all the happy snapping and the "catching a moment", I suspect what I am after is creating shots that have a certain magic - the mojo. I want them to be "technically" good in terms of focus, sharpness, noise etc, but without the mojo they're just my versions of gazillions of photos that others have taken.

A refreshingly honest take on what is the constant condition of the amateur photographer. I mean no slur here - I am in exactly the same "amateur" position as anybody else today. Donovan summed it up well when he said, and I paraphrase: the amateur´s biggest problem is finding a reason to take a photograph.

In the days of assignments it was a breeze: one simply went out to create the best shots one knew how to create; the motivation was ego, money and, above the others, retention of client at the cost of another rival.

As an amateur, the inevitable questions: does it matter a damn? Won´t tomorrow do just as well?

So yes, you have it nailed. But the mojo plays by its own rules and bides its own time.

I envy the motivation that drives James and the others still doing it for real.

Rob C

Someone recently saw some party photos I had taken - which contained some real good ones - and asked me if I would do it professionally. I said no, because I couldn't guarantee the quality. And perhaps more to the point, financially it wouldn't be worth the time or investment to get to a point where I could guarantee the quality. I earn far more doing commissioned writing "for real".

The paradox is that while I do paid writing, the thought of writing for pleasure (except in places such as this) fills me with horror. I very much like taking photos, for a variety of reasons, but I very much doubt that I would like to do it as a profession.

When I was still in school and about to sit my Highers - English equivalent probably A-Levels - I had this urge to write and photograph and travel seemed the perfect combination. But life had other plans, and the writing took a holiday until about six or seven years ago when I started getting interested in the internet and retirement provided the time to explore some of it.

But, in the end, there doesn´t seem to be much space about (or I have yet to find it) where anything really brings much sustained conversation or discussion; everything seems to degenerate into argument or outright hostility. What a shame it has to end like that.

Rob C

If I were the one organizing a wedding or party shoot, I'd have at least two separate photographers - one strictly for the formal shots, and one for candids with no particular rules. That way there's no question about the pro fees for the formal stuff, and whatever comes out of the candid shots is pay by the slice.

Why should the ability to paint brilliantly be be conditional on giving up your camera gear? Why not keep the gear and learn how to paint?

It was more like one of those mythical choices - a forced choice, if you will. In due course I may well learn how to paint and definitely keep the gear. But at the moment, with three teen/pre-teen kids, a wife away at med school all week and a family income to earn I'm a bit short of time.