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Sunday, October 21 2007, 8:13 PM
One shot, one negative, one print
My good friend Jorge Gasteazoro and I have been talking about photography as an art form these last few months and with those talks Jorge has wrote this article about our discussions, which I believe sums up photography as an art and how we as photographer should start treating it an an art form rather than a means to make reproduction after reproduction.
One Shot, one negative, one print
by Jorge Gasteazoro
Al Weber in his book “The next step” mentions that the purpose of creativity is to create! At first sight a self evident statement, yet when one thinks about it, photography and photographers invariably stray from this simple fact.
In other art disciplines, the artist is forced to explore his (his as a generic term meaning both genders) creativity, you rarely if ever see a painter or sculptor create duplicates of the same work. They might find a technique they like, use it, get as much as they can out of it and then they move on. Great examples are Kandinsky, Picasso, Dali, etc.
In contrast photographers find a technique they like, a formula to create photographs that appeal or attract the viewers and then, more or less, they park themselves in this creative routine and churn out endless photographs that have the same appearance. In photography we call this developing a style! When was the last time you saw a 16x20 Michael Kenna that was not sepia toned? We would bet never, Mr. Kenna has found his “style” and has been doing the same kind of photography for the last 20 years or more. Worse, his success has spawned a generation of photographers who, with more or less success, have copied his style.
As photographers we are guilty of routine thinking, we are following the model that was created by those who became famous photographers and have not examined how photography has evolved, especially what we now call “traditional” photography. One of the properties of photography is the capability of making reproductions. Yet, as photographers, we are not thinking out of the box. Just because we can make more than one photograph from the same negative it does not mean we have to!
There has been nothing more damaging to having photography considered as an art than blindly following this capability of photography to create more than one photograph from the same negative. It has stifled the photographer’s creativity, find a “style” and stick with it, it has given rise to a system of selling photographs which in our opinion is fraudulent; namely the creation of “editions” to falsely create scarcity and most importantly, in the search for the new style, new kind of photography, it has elevated mediocrity to the sublime. This confuses the viewing public when photography venues such as galleries and museums show photography as “art” which in many cases makes the viewer think “well heck, I can take pictures like that!”
Ask any photographer to destroy or give away his negative(s) and you will be met with incredulity, bafflement or even scorn. Looking from the perspective of an artist, it is hard to understand what is so precious about a negative, other than the idea that we have been programmed to think this way by photography’s history. The final work of art is the print; the negative is just a step in between, why then not discard it? Like a painter cleans his palette once he finishes a panting, regardless of how difficult it was to mix the colors he wanted.
The term “fine art” photography was coined to differentiate that type of photography which the creator considers artistic, yet as photographers we don’t behave like artists. Photographs are not paintings, yet neither are they lithographs, from which the idea of “editions” was born. We consider this current model of marketing photographs one of the greatest frauds in photography in detriment to both the collector and the photographer. Why is it that the price of photographs raises within an edition? If we are going to follow the model of editioning as it is done in lithography then the first print should be the most valuable, not the hundredth photograph made! A negative does not wear out as a lithographic plate does. Editioning is nothing more than a scheme to create artificial scarcity, if this is the intention of editions, why then not go all the way and make just one photograph?
The strength or appeal of any work of art resides on the combination of superb craft and personal vision. Making just one photograph from each negative will certainly not make the photograph more appealing art, but it has some benefits that are both advantageous for the photographer as well as the photography collector.
In the end, as photographers it is time that we start to behave like artists. It is time to break the mold and seek solutions that will benefit the photographer and collector alike. It is time we forget the tools we use and be limited by them and give free reign to our creativity by going outside the boundaries we have all imposed to ourselves.
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