Pixiq

Sounds like a simple question, but it’s really a very complex question today. I believe it has to do with your personal comfort zone and many photographers have a hard time with images outside their comfort zone.

I’ve been reading dialog I followed in a very long web path starting on Rob Haggart’s A Photo Editor blog, to Nick Shere and Karl Gunnarsson’s one125.net blog, which quotes Laura Miller in Salon.com, who uses a quote by C.S. Lewis from an actual book (remember those?) he wrote titled “An Experiment in Criticism”. Laura Miller’s blog post, titled “Why We Like Bad Writing”, which can effortlessly be applied to photography reads as follows, with her words in quotes and Lewis’s in single quotes:

“Until recently, hardly anyone considered why some readers might actually prefer clichés to finely crafted literary prose. A rare critic who pondered this mystery was C.S. Lewis, who — in a wonderful little book titled “An Experiment in Criticism” — devoted considerable attention to the appeal of bad writing for what he termed the “unliterary” reader. Such a reader, who is interested solely in the consumption of plot, favors the hackneyed phrase over the original”

‘… because it is immediately recognizable. ‘My blood ran cold’ is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn’t want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.’

I agree, but as someone who straddles and views a wide variety of photography worlds, you have to consider the viewer’s viewpoint, not just your own. One person’s fine art is another is another person’s pretention. One person’s award winning photography is another’s hackneyed, clichéd work. One person’s money-making work is another’s trite photography. And there’s validity to all of it, depending on which street corner you’re standing on. Each person is viewing the same car accident going on, and each is seeing a different story, as though they were lost in a Japanese art film.

I’m reading a thread in PPA’s forum complaining as they do yearly about the cover on the association’s popular Professional Photographer magazine. If the cover image wanders beyond their safe zone, if the publisher, Cameron Bishopp, a talented magazine editor, attempts to stretch the boundaries of their comfort zone, the arrows come flying out. But their safe comfort zone is what sells in their communities, it’s what their customers buy, it’s what puts food on their table. So are they wrong in questioning photography that goes beyond their comfort zone? No, not in the least, but neither is Cameron from her position of stretching their visual experience. The funny thing is, no matter what goes on the cover, safe or stretching, one fraction of the community or another, still complains. There is no universal safe zone for all.

So what is the answer my question- what makes good photography? I don’t think there is a definitive answer; it’s like asking how many angels fit on the head of a pin. The answer depends on what you believe in. Is an Ansel Adams 16x20 print of Moonrise Hernandez any better than a snapshot print, from a drugstore, off a bad cell phone camera file, of a 5 year old catching their first fish with dad or scoring their first goal in a soccer match? Is Adam’s classic work any more important than either 4x6 snapshot of a monumental family event? Depends on where you stand.

I think the real answer is to expand your visual horizons, go beyond your comfort zone, and take in as much as you can of this wonderful tapestry of images that you can find in our vast world of photography.