Justify My Art

Congratulations if you manage to make it to the end of this marathon epic and stay awake. Verbal diarrhoea or meaningful discussion about photographic art? You decide.

One of the most common accusations in the photographic world is that fine art nude photographers do not produce worthwhile and evolving photography. Many opponents argue that fine art nudes have no place in modern photography, that fine art is cheapened by the inclusion of a naked woman, that it is not “serious photography.”

It is a generally accepted concept in fine art photography (so Brooks Jensen et al. say anyway) that in order to constitute a good photograph, an image should be powerful. It should stimulate some sort of emotional response in the viewer, enlighten him or teach him a new truth. In short the photograph should mean something.

However, the objective of a fine art nude photograph is not necessarily to arouse an erotic reaction in the viewer. The purpose is to idealise and create an unattainable vision of beauty, a goddess, a vision of perfection, captured for one moment in time. An emotional response is not guaranteed. Thus it is argued by fine-art purists that mere admiration and objectification of beauty is insufficient to qualify a photograph as fine art. The purists maintain that fine art nudes are meaningless because they don’t enlighten the viewer nor do they produce a deep emotional response. A b+w nekkid chick isn’t exactly as psychologically profound as Pepper No 30 or Moonlight over Hernandez, now is it?

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Further, it is argued that there are simply too many fine art nude photographers nowadays. If you Google “Fine Art Nudes” there are tens of thousands of hits. Because of the growth of the internet and cheap digital cameras, b+w nudes are considered too overdone, too predictable. There are now so many images out there in cyberspace that they all look the same, and the topic has become boring, trivial and irrelevant. The genre is exhausted.

Lastly, we should consider the motivations of fine art nude photographers. Do nude photographers actually believe in art, or is it just an excuse to be in the same room as a naked woman? Nowadays every middle-aged bloke wants to be a fine art photographer. It allows him to get up close and personal with a naked chick and justify it as Art to his wife. Whether or not this means a photographer is a GWC or a fine art photographer is a moot point. Some guys don’t actually want to have sex with a woman, they just want to be in the same room and worship the perfect unattainable female from a distance. They want to create that image of Venus in every model they shoot, to bring out the inner Goddess in each woman. Does this make the photographer a GWC or an artist? Is the classification of whether or not a photographer qualifies as a proper fine art photographer simply a matter of whether he is technically any good at lighting and composition? Can the lowly GWC be a fine-art photographer if he is skilled enough, and do his motivations actually matter?

Moreover, if a photographer concentrates exclusively on shooting the female nude, doesn’t this result in variations on the same theme over and over again? Sure the lighting and model may vary, but the message is the same throughout. Every model is the same goddess, just with different skin. Is the photographer who repeats himself over and over again actually achieving anything? If he is conveying an emotional message that women are divine and unattainable, then O.K. what happens once he has done that? Now what? Sure the photographer has to develop his lighting and technique, and he becomes a better photographer, but that is a technical exercise. How does the message of his photography evolve? How can he continue doing the same thing for years and years without going completely nuts?

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Now before you all go and throw your Hasselblads into the nearest swamp, I want to tell you a story told to Rich by a well respected nude photographer whom he met recently.

The photographer concerned used to be in the armed forces when he was younger. Because he had some photographic training, he was allocated the terrible task of photographing and cataloguing the dead bodies for identification. Now personally I can’t imagine a worse assignment for a photographer. The level of horror and carnage that he was exposed to must have been unimaginable. The photographer didn’t go into the gory details, but clearly the experience had scarred him emotionally for life. Anyway, when the photographer returned home from his assignment, he resigned his commission and although he remained a photographer, he vowed to only ever photograph what was beautiful and good in the world. For the rest of his life. And what could possibly represent beauty, goodness and purity more than a naked woman?

As Ansel Adams said, “it is just as important to bring people the evidence of beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.”

Ultimately nudes are like a beautiful landscape, where the subject is flesh rather than trees or a rock. Just as you can never grow tired of shooting different breathtaking landscapes, the beauty and infinite variety of the nude form can never become overdone or monotonous. It is the goal of the photographer to discover that unique individual spark within each woman, and if he succeeds, if only for a second, then that single moment captured by the camera is surely the essence of what photography is all about.

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I thought we'd have a Fine-Ass theme this time (as opposed to Fine-Art...oh never mind...)

How Not To Write An Artist’s Statement

For the first time, Rich has been asked for an artist statement from a site that wants to feature his work. Now as you know, Rich is not known for his flowery prose, and he’s certainly not adept at the art of bullshit. He’s interested in telling it like he sees it, from the heart, but after browsing around a great many bio’s and artists’ statements, it appears that Rich’s brief and honest “I shoot nekkid chix 'cos I love boobies” won’t exactly cut it in the serious art world.

He needs something a bit more profound, more descriptive, more eloquent, more waffly, in short he needs to prove that he is a fathomless, mega-deep, serious photographer who’s not remotely interested in ogling naked women, but instead is entirely focused on more noble and ethereal concerns.

Hmm. Where to begin.

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So we started by looking around everyone else’s. Lord almighty, that was an eye-opener. Does anyone ever read artists’ statements anyway? Well, we did, hundreds of them, and I can tell you that it was a hilarious experience. Overall, the word PRETENTIOUS springs to mind. No humour, no honesty, no straight-forward “I photograph because I love it. The End.” Instead almost everyone broke the first and most important rule of writing an artist’s statement: Write your statement in language that anyone can understand.

A few typical examples we came across:

“I seek to expose what is going on deep within the psyche of my subjects, and I use photography as an artistic medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of ourselves and our visual settings.”

“I like to pursue an idea to a conclusion that seems to have an inevitability about it, as though the [photograph] has always existed in an ethereal sense”

“Some artists say their photographs allow them to get closer to nature; mine allow me to get closer to my dreams”

“My primary concern is with the interaction of individuals with each other and with the rest of the cosmos, the interface of self with other.”

“If I can awaken in my subject an inner awareness of emotion or realisation of their true psyche, then I have succeeded in my quest for enlightenment”

Oh please. I mean...seriously...

No-one would believe this stuff in a million years. How can such garbage be taken seriously? O.K. Not all the statements were like that, but many of them were the stuff of fantasies, blatant bullshit riddled with arty-jargon. The strange thing is, that such flowery-arty-mumbo-jumbo appears to be mandatory. The more successful the artist or photographer, the more nonsensical and ethereal is the artist’s statement. Clearly, in order for Rich to prove he is not a GWC he should totally ignore the professional advice and instead spout psychological crap which bears no resemblance to reality, just as long as it sounds cool. Most importantly, it must always sound ARTY, otherwise how else can he possibly be taken seriously as Un Grand Artiste???

So let’s embrace our inner bullshitter and see what happens:

“I wish to breathe fresh air into the musty chateau of the art-nude genre with the quest for inner awakening of the psyche. The subtle nuances captured by my lens illuminate the richness and depth of the complex soul. My passion is to explore the waves of light and darkness as they caress the skin of the perfectly formed embodiment of Aphrodite. Each individual goddess is so beautiful that she commands attention and demands my intense exploration of her innermost depths.”

(Rough translation: Phwoar! Boobie Art Rocks!)

Whaddaya think folks?

Nope. IMO, not nearly deep ‘n’ arty enough. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

More alcohol, we definitely need more alcohol. Clearly all truly great artists’ statements should be written whilst completely out of one’s tree.

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IvoryFlame of course.

The Makeover

Welcome to the new look of Fluffytek.

I've spent the last week reworking the website, creating new graphics and layouts, sorting through the images and updating the galleries. Lots of work and lots of changes; it's a completely new site.

The gallery now has expanding images, just like the pages from the blog. For those of you who are curious, you can't do the expanding blog images thing without hosting the blog on your own website.

It was all finished off yesterday and all that remained were the changes to the blogger templates to make everything look coherent. So I spent yesterday afternoon editing the template in blogger and when it was finished, I saved the changes without publishing so that when I did this post all the updates would go through at once, and hay presto the new shiny Fluffytek site would be announced.

You can imagine how annoyed I was to get up this morning and find that blogger had published the changes anyway. Thus some of you had a preview of the new look but with all the links broken, and the page still embedded in a frame. So it looked ghastly and broken. Sorry about that.

So I took the whole site down!

And now it's back up.

You can navigate the site from the links at the top. You can keep up with what we are doing with twitter. We have one twitter account for Fluffytek and we will prefix Lin's twitters with L: and my twitters with R: so you know who is saying what.

So:
Do you like the new site?
Is it not awesomely good looking?
Is Twitter a good idea?
Do you want to hear our insane ramblings?

Please take a look around and let us know what you think.

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This is Ivory Flame launching herself as well as the new Fluffytek website.

Does A Photograph Have to Tell A Story?

Since time immemorial philosophers and artists have believed that art must express a degree of depth, that it must communicate some sort of wisdom. In the 1700’s the philosopher Sir Joshua Reynolds stated that in order to be great art, a painting must tell a major story. In order to fully appreciate that art, viewers had to decipher or “read” this story from the image and understand its meaning.

This ethos has continued to permeate modern photographic philosophy, particularly in the nude photographic genre. It is not enough that the camera captures reality – in order for a photograph to be deemed successful photographic art, there must be an element of a story, something “more” to draw the viewer in. As a random example, dip into any image in the magnificent Fetish Photo Anthology 5, and you’ll find a story. Each image has a different tale to tell, even the (supposedly simple) portraits.

It is worth pointing out that story interpretation is subjective. Each viewer will visualise and extrapolate the individual photographs differently, according to what he thinks he can see. What matters is that the viewer is drawn to analyse the image, to seek a message from within the photograph. That’s what makes the photograph powerful. Successful art has the ability to generate emotion. The photographer’s job is not necessarily to convey his original intention of the image to the viewer, but rather to stimulate the imagination of the viewer to feel some sort of intellectual or emotional reaction, depending on each person’s own individual interpretation.

For example, when looking at a nude female photograph, women will usually look for a different message than men. I tend to look for the overall message of the photograph first, examine the emotion that it generates in me. I’m not really looking for the erotic thrill of seeing a naked chick, I don’t look at details, I’m searching for the esoteric, the spiritual message within (assuming there is one.) A man might see that too of course, but you’ll appreciate that a man is more likely to experience an erotic reaction to a photograph of a nude, than a heterosexual woman would.



Rich thinks this is all codswallop. He says he doesn’t do stories. As you all know he favours fine-art figure studies, which he says, tell no story. He reckons that photographs don’t have to tell a story to be classified as artistic. It is enough to capture what is really there. A story is nice, but not always required. He says his own photographic motivations are to bring out the best in a woman, “to make her look the best she can possibly be.” Thus, he says, no story is present in a figure study, and nor is any “inner message” necessary for this genre to be classified as artistic.

I think he is wrong. IMO a figure study does tell a story, but it is a tale of light and shadow and mood, a story of an ordinary woman being elevated to something more ethereal. She looks perfect, unattainable, almost unearthly. The art nude photograph reflects not just the ordinary woman within, it combines the physical and the celestial, reality and fiction, through the technique of light, shadow, composition and posing. The ordinary woman becomes “something greater” than what she usually feels, she becomes just a little bit like a goddess. On looking at her finished images, a model will often say, “Wow! I never knew I could look like that. I’m really beautiful.” And THAT itself is the story. If the only depth and wisdom that art-nude photography achieves is to make a woman realise her inner beauty, then that’s enough story for me.

So, unlike Rich, I believe that successful photographs do tell a story, and that’s why we crave looking at them so much. Just as a child is addicted to listening to stories, we grownups also continue to resemble the children we once were. We grow older but we do not change. We always crave the next story, and the next. They are as essential to our survival as food. Whether these stories are via the written word, through illustrations or through photographs, it doesn’t matter, just as long as we are fed.

The photographer is therefore so much more than someone who merely captures and records reality. He is our master storyteller, the creator of magic, and the artist who has power over our imagination.

The Five Percent

People are sheep.

No this isn’t me being condescending and arrogant again. It’s fact.

A study by Professor Jens Krause of Leeds University Biological Sciences Department found that it takes a minority of just 5 percent of what he calls “informed individuals” to influence a crowd of 200 people. The remaining herd of 95 percent follow the 5 percent without even realising they are doing it.

If you think about it, this is entirely logical because after all, we are animals, and we are therefore genetically programmed to follow general animal herding behaviour. We just don’t realise we are being led. In truth most of us (95 percent to be exact) are happy to play follow-my-leader, regardless of whether or not the leader actually knows what he is doing.

Of course you’re all thinking of politics at this point, and you’d be correct of course. But this same principle applies to everything, including photography. Ed Verosky recently lamented photographers copying a certain photographic style originally devised by Jill Greenberg.

Is this a case of the herd instinct taking over? Is plagiarism (Oh God, I used the “P” word and I vowed I’d never do that again) not actually the fault of those that imitate certain styles or images, but simply a result of genetic programming? Is the animal photographer just following the herd because he can’t help it? Is it actually hardwired instinct for the majority of us to follow the photographic fashion of the time, whether that fashion be a lighting style, a pose, a “look,” an idea, or a combination of these factors?

The herd instinct is programmed into 95% of us. Only 5 percent of you out there are actually naturally born innovators, leaders, creators of unique photographic ideas/styles/images etc. So only 5 percent of you reading this actually find it natural to think outside the box, to create something photographically and artistically unique.

You’ve no idea how much I envy you. The rest of us, the remaining 95%, we are merely programmed to follow where you lead.

If you want to move from the 95 percent to the 5 percent, then you have to fight your herd instinct with very fibre of your being. It’s just so easy to march to the beat of everybody else’s drum. But you can’t. You want to be part of the 5 percent. We all do. So you have to learn to fight your genetics, re-program your artist’s brain to actually THINK differently, practice viewing and imagining things from a different perspective. To paraphrase Brooks Jensen, the next time the flock veers left, try wandering off right just for fun, and seeing where the journey takes you.

Yes it will be difficult, challenging and you might not be sure that the end result actually qualifies as artistic, but whoever said making a decent photograph was easy?

Looking but not seeing - The PhotoSig Wars

Yesterday, for a bit of fun, I decided to post one of my images of IvoryFlame to Photosig. I wanted to see how quickly it would get on the front page and see if the quality of the critiques had gone up.

The photo hit the front page within about an hour of being posted, which was most excellent.

The critiques were about the same “quality” as usual but they set me thinking about what the viewers were saying and why.

There were several responses in appreciation of how much they liked the image and inevitably there were a few that wanted to offer technical improvements to my technique. These were the ones that set me thinking.

There are Photosig members who base their critique on opening the image in Photoshop and playing with the levels to see where the white point is, if there are any blown highlights, if there is actually any absolute black, and of course the contrast levels. This is the basis of their critique. If you don’t have an absolute white then that’s not good, if you don’t have an absolute black, then that’s not good either. If the face is not illuminated, then that will be criticised. Shadows can't be the focal point of an image.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

That's like trying to listen to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony with a spectrum analyser. Hearing music is insufficient, you have to listen to really appreciate a piece. Looking at a photograph is pointless, you have to actually see it to appreciate it.

I'd also like to mention two words by way of education.

"Specular Highlight."

This is the highlight that is created when light bounces off a shiny object such as glass or chrome. What many people don’t realise is that at a low angle of incidence, human skin also produces specular reflection. This specular reflection cannot by its nature have any detail in it because it is a highlight. Underexposing a specular highlight still creates a specular highlight, but it’s just grey not white.

Anyhoo, its time to show you the picture. Hopefully this image creates a certain sense of mystery, and not the sort that is fixed by playing with Photoshop.

Enjoy.



Addendum:
After an argument with the admins of Photosig as to whether I should accept and value any and all crits (from poeple who have a port of crappy images or no images at all), it appears I am "arrogant" and "love my work." Phew, to think that I might actually hate my work!?! Now there's a thought!

Dose this mean I've made it as a photographer? After all, the majority the great photographers whom I admire have gone to war with Photosig and then left.

Hurrah, I must be a photographic artist at last!!!!!

Eostre Greetings

Apologies for being a little wacko this week. I suspect that 70 hour working weeks and radiation fallout don’t go well together. I’m not of this politically correct American art world. Different rules apply there, and sometimes I forget that when I'm tired. Plus the trouble with blogging is that, at some point, you discover that you’ve become lost in your own ass. Mr Wood has always maintained that if he wrote a blog it would consume him, and I’m beginning to realise the same problem.

Talking of pleasant posteriors, here’s another rather spiffing shot of the gorgeous IvoryFlame. This image sucks on my little laptop monitor and looks bloody fabulous on Rich’s groovy high resolution monitor (Synchmaster 244T.) This monitor resolution issue is really frustrating us both. You’ve no idea just how many kick-ass photographs we don’t show on-blog because most people can’t see the fine detail due to lower grade monitors like mine. The subtleties are just lost.

There’s different shades of black you know, and some are blacker than others. A valid statement about my moods this week, as well as about publishing photographs.

*sigh* If only I could show you the prints instead.



Incidentally, for those that don't know, Easter is primarily a pagan festival. Eostre was the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. She was supposedly reincarnated in the form of a hare, since it was widely believed that when hunted, the mother hare would sacrifice herself so that her offspring could escape. So that's why you get cute little chocolate rabbits everywhere at Easter. Easter eggs symbolise fertility because, well duh, life hatches from them. So basically (Christians please look away now) Easter is about spring sex.

Wishing you all a great Eostre, with lots of fertility rituals:-)

(For those that want to debate theology and the actual date of the death of Jesus, please do feel free to email me.)

(R6) Creative Vision

In which the writer becomes the photographic blogosphere's Public Enemy No.1.

Franz Rosenzweig defined “creative vision” as “the artist’s plan, the basis for the individual artist’s construction of his individual work.” Nowadays, this term is more generally used to refer to when a photographer has a vision of his unique style in his head. He sees what he wants to shoot before he shoots it, and through the medium of photography, his creative vision is realised in the final image. Voila! True art is born!

Unfortunately this inspirational little phrase has now become so overused in the photographic community that I get very annoyed every time I hear it. Which is often. Very, very often.

“Creative vision” is a modern catch-phrase, a must have accessory. You’re not a real photographer unless you have one. You can justify just about any photograph as “true art” because it reflects the “creative vision” of the photographer. It doesn’t matter if the image in question is messy, chaotic, badly shot or just plain awful, in this modern politically correct art world it isn’t polite or cool to be critical of an image. All images can be defined as “art” because art must be subjective nowadays, and so you have to be nice, you have to see meaning or depth in an image, you have to look for the photographer’s “creative vision.” So what if you secretly don’t understand it? So what if you don’t feel anything for the image? If you don’t like it then you, the viewer, are a bad critic because clearly you don’t understand the artist’s true vision.

Oh please. Why the hell can’t we call a bad photograph, “a bad photograph?” Why should I be the one at fault because I don’t understand you? Isn’t it just remotely possible that your art is just not very good? Why does me being less artistically educated than you, mean that I am missing something about your work?

The truth be told, bad photographers are prevalent in the art world. We all know it. Their work may be trite, amateurish, a load of rubbish, but because the photographer is good at marketing himself, because he’s skilled in the art of bullshit, then he can convince just about anyone that his work is good. The charlatan artist can schmooze you into believing that his creative vision is so subtle, so mysterious, so esoteric that because you don’t understand his work, this actually means that you, the viewer, are the one who is at fault. Clearly you don’t recognise his creative vision as the work of genius that it really is.

What a load of bollocks. But people are taken in by it all the time. I know I used to be. Producing bad art and promoting it as genius is very seductive, but it’s actually fake, a lie, a betrayal of what creative vision actually should be.

I do believe that there is such a concept as “creative vision,” but it is a nebulous concept, not easily translated into words, and even harder to translate into a photograph. And not every photographer has one.

Real creative vision is ordered, disciplined, harmonious, unique to the individual artist, and its beauty is such that it can be translated by the artist into something that can be easily understood by the viewer. Creative vision is constantly evolving, never static, an ongoing quest for knowledge, to paraphrase Cézanne, “a model of steadfast learning and growth, the artist’s value lies not so much in what he can MAKE, but in his capacity to seek and continue to find.”

My personal opinion is that it takes an entire lifetime to discover your real creative vision, because it is all about figuring out your own unique message you are meant to express to the world through your work. And maybe, just maybe, by the time you do discover it, in many years time, you’ll have enough experience, practice and insight to be able to produce the artistic vision of which you alone are truly capable, because you will finally understand yourself.



Introducing IvoryFlame.