Hers are very, very pretty images. And I envy her technical skill and patience.
But ultimately I feel that for art, they are over-processed. They tend towards the look of advertising or posters. They’ve acquired so much glossy surface that the deeper qualities are getting a bit drowned out.
That said, I also think there are some great compositions, for instance the picture below.
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Below is a photo of my own which I've post-processed in these manner, just a brief experiment. I must admit it's addictive, but I'm still not sure what I think of it artistically.
Original:
OK, I'll confess I think it improved the picture.
Maybe it just has to be used with a light hand.
I don't know, though, I kind of get the feeling when looking at heavily processed photos, that it's... dishonest somehow. It looks like reality, but it isn't. Because it looks so real and so powerful, the viewer can't help but believe in it, but you're cheating him. Like putting up a hologram of a table of food in front of a hungry man.
The viewer can't help but feel that if he was walking where the photographer had been walking, he would see the things he see on the photo, looking like they do on the photo. And he would feel the beauty. But he wouldn't, because that photo is fiction, brought forth in a computer.
I could be wrong, it's just a feeling I get, very visceral (a gut feeling, both figuratively and literally).
Like the feeling I got as a kid if I'd been swimming for hours at the beach. A sort of empty feeling of unreality. Odd.
Most paintings don't give me a feeling like that, surely because it's "not-real" in an obvious way.
Jim said:
I have to confess I'm also ambivalent about it, although I don't consider what comes out of the camera to be sacrosanct because the camera-processed image is seldom true to the original as experienced. Lately I've experimented with adding contrast and color saturation, which is sometimes truer to the moment. Obviously altered images are interesting as a novelty I guess, but it seems more like a dexterity than art...sort of like a Thomas Kinkade painting. It's always a thrill to get a remarkable image straight from the camera that needs no "makeup".
Funny I was just thinking about Kinkade. I'm not sure if it's the same issue, maybe it is.
Maybe the issue I'm feeling for here is when the superficial qualities of a work of art get dialed up to a point where they get out of balance with the deeper qualities.
(I should note that Kinkade is an extreme in this regard. Ms. Varner's art has lots of deeper qualities, it's just that she is so skilled with the more immediate qualities that I feel that they threaten to dominate.)
8 comments:
I have to confess I'm also ambivalent about it, although I don't consider what comes out of the camera to be sacrosanct because the camera-processed image is seldom true to the original as experienced. Lately I've experimented with adding contrast and color saturation, which is sometimes truer to the moment. Obviously altered images are interesting as a novelty I guess, but it seems more like a dexterity than art...sort of like a Thomas Kinkaid painting. It's always a thrill to get a remarkable image straight from the camera that needs no "makeup".
Varner aside,
For some photographers the photo is the end result, for others the photo is just the beginning. As a painter by education, I see the photograph as the later, just a jumping off point towards a not so clear end.
It's attractive work, but I have to say that I started to doubt the underlying reality after looking at a lot of them. She writes that she tries to maintain the integrity of the original shot, and I'm willing to take her at her word I suppose. But when I look at some of them, thoughts like "was there really a bird in that perfect position?" start to creep into my head. I think if the shots were not so obviously processed, I wouldn't be entertaining those doubts.
Thanks for pointing out Diane Varner, I had never heard of her.
Impressive technical skills indeed, but somehow the result is a bit like Disney art - polished, manufactured, shipped to millions.
Indeed I feel that there is a way for the meaning to disappear because of too much polishing.
The world is, after all, imperfect.
I also see a kind of theater in the photos. There are photographers who go to even greater extremes in post-processing, and some also approach photography as a kind of performance/theater art, using costumers, fancy cars, etc. as the building blocks.
This is reality the way you want to have it.
NeutralDay, back in the nineties when I first started hearing about digital photo processing, I felt the same way: the photo would just be the powerful spring board for an infinity of art that could be done with it.
But I find that now I can, I simply don't do it. I don't have the impetus.
It feels like the middle between two paths.
I'm not saying it's wrong, and certainly not any kind of moral wrong. It's just that to my surprise it simple doesn't work right for me. It's a "meatball Sundae", to use Seth Godin's term.
There may be two different questions here. One is over-prettification of art, the other one is making a painting out of a photograph while still keeping it looking like a photo.
Adjusting the photo to look more like what you saw isn't "cheating". The camera (film or digital) doesn't see the way we do. Leaving out DOF and focal length; there is the whole pulling apart similar colors, the color tint in shadows, and other things. Looking at Dan Margulis' classes on LAB from Kelby Training gives a bit more insight to this.
I have no qualms with excessive prettiness in any kind of work. In general I prefer Matisse to Dubuffet, but as to photography, since objectively none of it is real, I don't see the need for limitations on what might be needed to make an image "feel" right. If that means giving this photo a holga look, so be it.
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