About Classic Composition

[Ted Byrne]

Here's a textbook illustration for vanishing point composition. Wheeeee! Anyone want to write a textbook? Need an illustration???

[eob]

I like the composition a lot. Indeed, the perspective in this picture plays the main role.

However, I look at this image as if it was a painting, not a photograph. There's probably nothing wrong with using a photograph as a base for painting - digital or traditional - and many painters had done exactly that. Nevertheless, I feel a bit uneasy when a photograph is used in such a way. Does that mean that photography on its own does not provide adequate means of expression? Does it need a reinforcement of painterly effects? Does it need a validation by comparison to "established" form of visual arts?

[Ted Byrne]

You write, "Does that mean that photography on its own does not provide adequate means of expression? Does it need a reinforcement of painterly effects? Does it need a validation by comparison to "established" form of visual arts?"

And no... it means that a rose by any other name... is still a rose.

Now you see why I have bristled at organic photographers who will not quite allow what I do to be considered photography as if their understanding and/or understandable sensitivities accrued over their lifetimes is sufficient to create a definitive definition of the word... "photography".

If it involves photography, is driven by photography, is impossible without photography, it is... a photography. :-)

I am not a photographic illustrator, nope... I'm a photographic artist. Wheeee! The ride's pretty delirious.

[eob]

I would really like to agree with your standpoint, Ted.

I myself sometimes use photography as a base for creating images that can only marginally be considered photographs. But I call them collages, graphics or digital art. When I think of photographs, I mean images created entirely with a camera and only slightly corrected or enhanced with a computer.

In my view, the whole discussion about how far we could go in the process of creating art based on photography and still call it photography is pointless. I bet, my restrictive formula of the art photography is no more a hindrance for me than your expansive and all-encompassing formula is for you. So, no matter whether we call it a rose or a sunflower, we got the botanics in our minds...

[Ted Byrne]

I concede your point, but of course choose not to agree... that's the greatness of artistic freedom, dualistic ideas which seem contradictory can simultaneously exist... in the same mind. And for me, as I've suggested elsewhere I too have a limit beyond which I cannot seem to permit the title "photograph" to go.

I'm thinking here of artists who mine the work of different, purchased, images to create seamless images which may or may not be stitched together with purely digital devices into final works that are seemingly indistinguishable from photographs... and yet the artist never personally employed, at any point in the creation... a camera.

So I arbitrarily refuse to grant the title photograph upon the end product of an artist who never photographed. Even though every element in his/her final work may have been photographically generated. My work is the work of a photographer... If your collages are generated from your photographs... both of us are photographic artists. The final product, I argue is photography. But, if no part of the final image ever passed through your camera... well... That's where I draw my... (once again) arbitrary line.

[eob]

I'm thinking here of artists who mine the work of different, purchased, images to create seamless images which may or may not be stitched together with purely digital devices into final works that are seemingly indistinguishable from photographs... and yet the artist never personally employed, at any point in the creation... a camera.

Oh, I see now what you were talking about.

So I arbitrarily refuse to grant the title photograph upon the end product of an artist who never photographed.

I arbitrarily call those "artists" scavengers. I got no interest whatsoever in this kind of "creativity".