More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition. Guy Tal
of their formal pursuits to express ulterior meaning, they transcend objective truth and lie like artists do, in the sense expressed by Picasso: lies that make us realize the truth—not objective, measurable, truth, but an expression of subjective, inner truth.
Regrettably there are also those photographers who lie about lying; those who follow trends and recipes without questioning, contemplating, or contributing anything of their own; those who try to pass off their work as representing objective reality because it’s what their audience wants to believe, rather than take the time to educate their audience about the nuances of art and the many things that one can express in a photograph beyond “this is what it looked like.”
Anyone harboring an artistic spirit likely can intuitively distinguish those works conceived of passion, contemplation, creativity, and love—works that express significance beyond a misplaced allegiance to literal representation obscured by a veneer of hype and artificiality. The most effective art tells a truth, not the truth, and does so not by being descriptive in a literal sense, but by offering metaphors for the (true) state of mind of the artist, which would otherwise be not just unknown, but unknowable to anyone else.
If you want your work to represent your own truth, then you should embrace the lies and lie like you mean it! No product of human conception can contain all tangible dimensions of an experience; and even if it could, it would not be of much use as art since even the most complete objective account explicitly leaves out the subjective touch of a creative artist. In my mind, art and objectivity do not mix. An artist is one who creates meaning, who expresses a significance born of their own mind, and who relays their own inspiration in their work. Postulating about what amounts to “objective reality” (whether true or not) is the business of scientists, journalists, judges, and priests. Artists work in the subjective.
9The Meaning of Words
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
—Joan Miró
A fellow photographer I respect and with whom I corresponded in the past wrote to say that he was not comfortable with one of my essays in which I drew a distinction between documentary photographs and fine-art photographs (his terms, not mine), both of which I believe to be overloaded and difficult terms to define in an absolute way.
A topic I routinely explore and write about is the general lack of acknowledgment of categories within the larger realm of photography. Think, for example, about writing. Readers have no problem applying different frameworks of appreciation and judgment to novels, essays, news reports, poems, or other uses for written words; painting aficionados readily distinguish between the abstract and the realistic, and numerous subgenres in between. In photography such separation is not quite so well established. To many viewers, all products of a camera are judged by a single criterion, as if they are intended to accomplish but one purpose: to accurately record the appearance of things as anyone present at the scene may have seen them. I attribute such lack of sophistication to the fact that our medium is relatively young and, to a significant degree, also a victim of much prejudice. Certainly, we can all think of exceptions, and so it is my hope and belief that a more nuanced mode of thinking will evolve in due time.
The word “art,” derived from the Latin artem (same as artifact and artificial) and referring specifically to the products of manual skill, was explicitly coined to describe aesthetic objects produced by application of craftsmanship. Put another way, the very word art describes something that is not naturally or spontaneously occurring, but rather something manufactured. Over the years, the term art came to be associated with a staggering array of items, from calligraphy to strategies of war; from pottery to video games; from engraving to managing a business; from exquisite ornaments to an autographed urinal; etc. In our time, it seems that the only definition of art still standing (and articulated by various thinkers) simply is: anything that is presented as art. While perhaps true, such a definition is of little practical use as it can no longer be used to delineate between what is art and what is not art, nor be applied in any consistent way.
With that in mind, I am now very reluctant to use the term art in my writing. Instead, I make the separation between representational photography and creative photography. By today’s definition, both can be considered art; however, by making this distinction I also can return to the original intent of distinguishing human-crafted creations from naturally occurring phenomena that are literally re-presented to an audience. Also, by making this distinction, I avoid the prickly topic of associating value with either term. The fact that an image is representational or creative does not, in itself, imply that one is more elevated than the other, as both may manifest in exceptional or mediocre work, or anything in between.
I characterize my work as creative explicitly to suggest that it may deviate from “the way it really looked,” because I want there to be a sharp and honest division between reality and artifice. I care very much about the reality of the things I photograph, and I believe that to conflate this reality with the limitations of what may be expressed in a photograph most often leads to the diminishing of the former rather than the elevation of the latter. This is because such conflation always requires a degree of misrepresentation.
A creative image is not a record of a scene nor a substitute for a real experience; it is an experience in itself—an aesthetic experience—something the artist has given the world, rather than a contrived view of something that already existed independent of the artist.
10No Lesser an Art
Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature, or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings. . . . You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.
—Alfred Stieglitz
Now back from my autumn travels, I feel fortunate to have witnessed extraordinary beauty as I drove and hiked in my beloved deserts of the American West. I started my journey on Utah’s high plateaus, catching the last of the golden foliage in the aspens mixed with early snow, before descending into the southern canyons to see maples turning red and small creeks flush with recent rains. Exiting the sandstone wonderland of the Colorado Plateau I entered the Mojave Desert, where I walked among Joshua trees, creosote bushes, barrel and cholla cacti, and breathed in the intoxicating air of a wet desert.
Along the trip, I also managed to visit four photography galleries and admired the fine works of photographers working in the region. It occurred to me that only one of the galleries I visited offered information referring to the photographer as “The Artist,” and that practically all the works I had seen were explicitly promoted as representational in nature, some going out of their way to proclaim the use of “natural” light and “traditional” processes, perhaps attempting to assert that these somehow elevated their work’s value, while in fact shifting much of the credit away from the photographer’s creative mind and attributing it instead to natural forces, technology, chance, and chemistry.
It is no wonder that artistic photography featuring natural subjects struggles to claim a place among the fine arts when photographers shy away from creative expression and are quick to dismiss their own role in their work beyond the mechanics of operating a camera, scouting scenic locations, or making a print, thus reducing themselves to mere spectators and operators of machines rather than creative artists, and being more concerned with literal transcription than expressed metaphorical significance.
It seems that most consumers of photography have come to expect photographs portraying natural subjects to be heavily slanted toward representation of things already in existence, while artistic photography often is perceived as having to do with decidedly obscure and abstract renditions; often focused on humanity’s antics, enterprises, and tragedies, commonly referred to as “the human condition.” Caught in between, creative nature photography understandably suffers from an identity crisis. In truth, it fits neither category