Angela Faris Belt – The Elements Of Photography

Автор: Angela Faris Belt
Название книги: The Elements Of Photography
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Фотография
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

“One fact that is not in dispute is that there is a widening
gulf opening up between art and commercial
photography, between professors and professionals.”
—Bill Jay in Occam’s Razor
It is no new observation that throughout the history of
photography its practitioners have been segregated into one
of two distinct disciplines, professional or fi ne art practices.
Th at this self-conscious distinction creates limitations for
practitioners on both sides is evidenced by the large percentage
of fi ne artists who attempt more or less successfully
to support themselves in the professional fi elds and an
equal percentage of professionals who vie for acceptance of
their art work in galleries. Th e separation of photographic
practices is perpetuated through a higher education system
in which the overwhelming majority of photography
programs emphasize one of the two disciplines: technical
education (the goal of which is to train students to become
successful professional photographers) or fi ne art practices
Preface
(whose primary structure prepares students for success as
fi ne artists). Although ideal in many respects, the system’s
inherent drawback is that while the marketplace off ers
vast opportunities for both professionals and fi ne artists,
academia’s singular-focus approach limits graduates’
chances of success, and inhibits the useful carry-over of
techniques and ideas from one discipline to the other.
College photography programs situated within Technical
Schools (those off ering degrees in commercial, editorial,
consumer portraiture, etc.) tend to organize curricula
around the mechanics of the medium, producing graduates
whose images demonstrate skilled craft and technical
profi ciency. Adept at using the most complex, state-of-theart
equipment and materials, the best graduates of these
programs produce images demonstrating feats of technical
perfection with eye-catching style. However, many
of their best photographs lack any substantive meaning,
and at worst their images miscommunicate, because these
photographers are undereducated in the areas of photography
and art history, visual literacy, critical theory, and aesthetics.
Th ese indispensable aspects of photographic study
simply do not permeate most technical school curricula.
As conceptual photographer Misha Gordin states, “Th e
poor concept, perfectly executed, still makes a poor photograph.”
(See Misha Gordin’s work in the Portfolio Pages of
Chapter 1.) Th is fact is not lost on visually literate viewers
such as editors, publishers, graphic designers, art buyers,
gallery and museum directors and curators, not to
mention the media-viewing public. On the other side of
the educational spectrum, photography programs situated
within Fine Art Departments emphasize the communicative
nature of photographs—their content, theoretical and
historical positioning, and meaning—but they do so often
at the expense of time spent practicing the medium’s technical/
mechanical side—its equipment and materials and
their specifi cations, benefi ts, and limitations. Th e students
of these programs produce images fi lled with intelligence,
insight, passion, and depth, much of which is often lost
owing to sheer lack of sophisticated technical accomplishment.
Again, to quote Misha Gordin, “Th e blend of a talent
to create a concept and the [technical] skill to deliver it,”
is the necessary balance of ingredients for making successful
photographs. I equate fi ne art photographers who create
technically poor images to poets possessing limited grammatical
skills; they may have volumes of insight to share
with the world about a subject, but they lack the proper
tools needed to successfully convey it to others. Taken to
the extreme, the photographers emerging from most photography
programs have for decades possessed a completely
lopsided perspective of the medium; they practice professional
or fi ne art photography in relative ignorance of the
myriad ways the medium’s “other half ” could inform and
enhance their work.
To complicate matters, with the advent and rapid adaptation
of digital technology, it seems that a new fi ssure has
been created, this one based on photographic media itself.
During the last decade it has come to pass that academic
programs have literally begun choosing between two discretely
defi ned light-sensitive media—traditional or digital.
Th is pressure to choose seems largely based on the desire
to conform to their particular discipline or industry’s media
focus, as well as the fi nancial pressures that ultimately come
to bear on academic institutions such as faculty areas of
expertise, limited time to cover curricular material, and the
simple matter of space limitations for either darkroom or
digital facilities. Many programs (and practitioners) have
rushed too quickly to recommend an either/or approach
suggesting that the decision to abandon traditional media
and convert completely to digital media will advance those
leaders who embrace it, and retire those relics who do not.
Th is approach is short sighted in several ways: students
tend to learn and practice only the technologies available to
them through their academic program, so the richness and
diversity of alternative media options go unconsidered. Also,
an either/or approach neglects careful examination of the
broader potential off ered by maintaining both. History is full
of examples of bad outcomes made so because of decisions
that lacked proper balance, and there are simply no good
reasons for photographic expression to suff er the same.
In addition to photography’s polarized academic structure
and the advent of digital media, many students unwittingly
set themselves up for failure in a particular branch of photography
because they are unfamiliar with the dual nature
of the medium when they enter a college program. Every
professor knows scores of students who did not consciously
choose the photography program they found themselves
in. Th at is, they did not make informed decisions by suffi
ciently defi ning their future goals and applying to institutions
that, through research, they learned would best meet
those goals. Two years and tens of thousands of tuition
dollars later, these students begin to understand (thanks
to some formal education and practice in the medium)
what direction they want to take in terms of their photography
career. Unfortunately, too many of these students
simultaneously discover that they are not in a photography
program best designed to help them succeed.
Th e negative eff ects of these combined problems—polarized
academic program emphasis, the pressure on programs
to convert solely to digital media, and student ignorance
of the range of potential careers in photography—can be
mitigated by the actions of dedicated professors through
course off erings which seek to simultaneously balance and
broaden the way students engage in photographic practices.
By designing a more holistic approach to photography education,
graduates emerge armed with sound knowledge of
the range of available tools, and are better able to defi ne,
choose, or change the emphasis of their photographic practice
throughout their careers. One aspect of this type of
mitigation is to develop courses based on the interconnectedness
of photography’s technical and aesthetic elements, beginning
with the primary technical elements from which all photographic
images are made. By integrating hands-on practice
with these technical elements with study and discussion of
their inherent visual outcomes, photography programs off er
students a more well-rounded education in the medium