In this article, I want to write about three criteria high-quality photography . After all, if you bought a DSLR, and even more so visited, then you want learn to take photographs, and your photographs should, naturally, be of high quality, right?
So let's get down to business.
Sharpness comes first
But this does not mean at all that the entire photograph should be sharp, no, it is not. But what about everyone’s favorite bokeh then? The semantic center of the photo should be sharp!
For example, in a portrait these are the eyes. Everything else may be blurry.
Disastrous overexposure
I have very valuable advice for you: it is better to make a photo darker than light. IN dark photography You can still draw out the shadows, but a photo with overexposure is very difficult to correct. Especially if you “killed” the sky. Also, try not to make “sun spots” on your model. Because there is a lot of contrast with the shadows.
Composition
You must provide for EVERYTHING, everything that will be in your picture. After all, even a small detail and the picture is ruined. For example, they often “like” to spoil photographs - power lines. Or the second gross mistake is cutting off limbs. You are a photographer, not a surgeon.
But, if it is difficult to deal with overexposure, then photographs can still be saved.
What did we manage to create – a masterpiece, a talented work, or something incomprehensible? It would seem that it could be simpler, but how often we are mistaken in our assessments, how often we “don’t know what we are doing”! And the ability to evaluate photographs – both your own and others’! – is extremely necessary for those who are creative in photography. This situation arises, for example, when we select works for an exhibition or to submit to a photo competition. Here they are lying on the table, yesterday they were living impressions of our lives, and today they are prints on photographic paper. Which ones are works of art and which ones are just sketches? And if you need to select worthy works in one evening from among those filmed over many years, what should you do then? This is where the need to apply some selection criteria arises.
Let's talk about them, about these very criteria and methods of selection. Do they even exist? And what should you rely on when selecting your works - only on intuition, on feelings, or on some objective criteria, such as composition, semantic component?
To begin with, there are at least four types of photographic images, each of which, of course, requires its own approach. What types of photographs are these?
1.Amateur or household photography. The purpose of such photographs is to fill the family album and preserve the memory of people and events. Signs of this type of images: the random nature of the events captured, technical errors, cliched ideas. A classic example of such a photo is “Here Vasya and I are in such and such a place.” Such photographs, as a rule, do not need evaluation and cannot be submitted to the exhibition.
2. Scientific and documentary photography. Its purpose is to convey information, document a newspaper article, Scientific research. Signs of documentary photographs: technique is more or less up to par, information richness, lack of emotional content. Such photographs are interesting for their information content, so they also do not require artistic assessment.
3. Commercial and advertising photography. The goal of commercial photography is to create an image that can be sold. In this case, the picture can be taken with a fair amount of imagination and contain some original ideas. And yet, this type of photography is characterized by “structured” compositions, a lack of life content and life truth, an emphasis on “beauty,” that is, external attractiveness, and not on the depth of content.
4. Artistic and creative photography. Photography as art. It is most interesting for the viewer, because it affects his feelings. Target artistic photography– to find and show the beautiful in life, as well as the typical, to embody in living, truthful images. One of the main criteria of real artistic photography is the truth of life!
Again, each of these types of images requires a different approach. And I will add that, as we have seen, not all types of photographs require evaluation. But sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what type of image our photo is. It seems to us that this is high art, but in reality it is amateurish. How are we going to evaluate our photograph, in which we suspect the presence of talent?
Let's try to evaluate a photograph as the majority evaluates it: by the feeling that arises in us. A photographer friend of mine very aptly called this method of assessment the “yoka method.” That is, when you look at a photo and your heart skips a beat, it means the photo is good! The assessment method seems to be familiar and trouble-free, but the problem is that all viewers’ hearts “sink” for various reasons. It is no secret that there are “visual super-stimuli” to which our senses unconditionally respond. For example, a man's feelings will most likely respond to an image of a woman (especially a naked one - regardless of the skill of the embodiment!), a woman's feelings - to any images of children and flowers, a child's feelings - to a photo of a dog or cat. Judging “by feeling” does a disservice when the viewer’s feelings are not developed and taste is not educated. There is another circumstance when we're talking about about evaluating your own photography. The fact is that the author is too emotionally attached to his work. The author cannot abstract himself from his memories, because he still has a fresh memory of the subject as he saw it in reality. The author keeps in his memory for a long time the unique colors of the sunset, the aroma of the flowers he photographed, not to mention beautiful model, under the spell of which he may still be to this day. The viewer evaluates only what is in front of his eyes - the photograph itself. So the first thing the author should do is try to look at the picture through the eyes of an outside viewer. The “detachment effect” will help to avoid overly subjective and personal assessments.
Now let’s try to evaluate a photograph using the second method of evaluation – “from the mind.” This means that the overall level of work, its visual literacy and compliance with certain requirements are assessed. Professional evaluation criteria are also included here, such as novelty and originality of the idea, light, composition, dynamics, color and tonal unity, and semantic component. This path seems to be correct, and can really tell us a lot about work. If it were not for one thing: it very often happens that a work that is undoubtedly competent and impeccable from the point of view of the canons of composition for some reason, in the most incomprehensible way, does not evoke a response in the soul of the viewer! Isn’t this what the French thinker Blaise Pascal spoke about: “The mind is always a fool of the heart”?
So, to summarize, we can say that it is IMPOSSIBLE TO EVALUATE A PHOTOGRAPHY SEPARATELY “BY FEELING” OR “BY MIND”. Both of these assessment methods are seriously flawed if used separately. Where is the way out? Probably, it’s about intelligently combining both of these methods of assessment: controlling your feelings with your mind and testing your mind with your feelings. Somewhere at the intersection of these two methods lies an “objective” assessment.
“Art is x, unfound, sought after,” wrote the poet Viktor Sosnora. Maybe the search for this X lies the secret of evaluating a photograph?
I wonder if it is possible to more specifically formulate the criteria for evaluating a photograph? I would like the readers of this article to try to do this themselves.
How to analyze photos?
Very often, photographers show their photos to friends and colleagues with a request to analyze them. The effectiveness of such an increase in skill is low, and the underlying desire to hear the analysis of the picture lies in the like-dislike summary. In most cases, it is impossible to repeat the same frame, since EVERY picture has its own unique composition and is unique in perception. Therefore, in principle, everyone can evaluate the merits of this or that image created by them, without relying on the subjective opinion of others.
To begin with, let's ask ourselves why the same photo is liked in some conditions, but not in others. Why, looking at a photo on a computer screen, we are delighted, while it does not evoke any emotions in its “paper” form? Why, when sorting through a pack of photographs, we simply quickly discard some, while others begin to examine. What EXACTLY caught our eye? Why is it that the same person, photographed with different lighting and an interval of two minutes, turns out to be ordinary in one picture, while the other picture is given the high title of “artistic” or “professional”?
If we answer these questions, the level of photographic skill will immediately increase. Not because we will use more modern photographic equipment and equipment. Not because our professionalism will suddenly grow sharply (this is always hard work, stretched over time). But we will simply know by what principles a person perceives an image.
So how do we look at the photo?
There are several options here.
First: when we look at it briefly.
In this case, the system of semantic centers already described here works very clearly. It is this system that forces the viewer’s gaze to dwell on the image when sorting through photographs or, for example, billboard, passing by him on a subway escalator.
Second: when we look at a photograph for a long time.
Then we can consider all its details and details. Photo exhibitions serve precisely these purposes. In another situation, no one would pay attention to some photographs, but at an exhibition it may attract attention.
Third: when we look at photographs on a monitor or TV screen.
Sometimes in parts. At the same time, the brain begins to put together an image in the head from separate parts, which significantly visually “corrects” the image. That is why, when summing up the results of photo competitions, a professional jury always evaluates photographs only in printed form, and not on a computer screen.
Fourth. Image format.
More precisely, does the viewer’s gaze take in the photograph as a whole or begins to look at it in parts. A large format always looks better than a small one. And in a very large format, provided that the viewer examines it closely, you can turn the most disastrous photograph into a masterpiece.
Fifth. If the picture shows a person familiar or close to the viewer, or something to which the viewer is not indifferent, then he will look at such pictures for a long time and carefully. Mountains on the horizon for a climber, a piece of the sea for a sailor through the trees, the glitter and poverty of glamorous boutiques for a fashionista - all these details of the photo will make it immeasurably more valuable for the corresponding categories of viewers than for everyone else.
Sixth. The viewer’s perception depends on many factors, level of education, spiritual wealth, complexities, advertising and social stereotypes, place of residence, social environment...
Therefore, the same photograph will be perceived differently by different categories of viewers. And therefore, when creating a photograph, you must always take into account who it is intended for. This often allows you to seriously save both money and time...
About harmony and composition
The criteria for professionalism are a rather abstract thing and depend on to a greater extent on the personality of the photographer rather than on his actual skill, taking into account the possibilities modern technology. Any photograph has only one criterion: either it touches the soul or it doesn’t. It is basically impossible to create a photo that everyone would like.
The photographer in the photograph must create a clear and understandable organization for the viewer of the parts of the image, which is so necessary for comfortable perception. Every person has an unconscious desire to discover a clear and visually stable organization in the arrangement of parts of a frame. It cannot be accidental, although, given all the diversity of the world and people around us, the accidental appearance of a harmonious photograph is quite possible. But the percentage of winning in this “lottery” is much higher if the photographer shoots based on his intuition and experience, that is, knowledge brought to automaticity.
When creating a photograph as a work of photographic art, that is, a harmonious work, it is necessary to create balance in the photograph. Compositional balance is a state of parts of an image in which all its elements are harmoniously balanced with each other. Some people have this feeling naturally developed. In whom it requires development. This is done with a simple exercise, taken as one of the disciplines in photo all-around. On a small site chaos is created from completely different objects. The photographer's task is to remove a small part of this disorder so that within the boundaries of the frame a balanced image is obtained. This is the simplest thing. The next exercise is more difficult, since a model is introduced into the frame and the entire palette of semantic centers is already connected, starting from action and ending with a pronounced emotion.
In order to evoke a negative emotion in the viewer when perceiving a photograph, the balance is deliberately disturbed in accordance with the photographer’s inner intuition. The same applies to dynamic photographs in which there is or is only supposed to be movement, internal energy. Truly artistic photographs usually do not have a single unnecessary detail.
A harmonious and balanced composition of a photograph is usually achieved not thanks to some abstract compositional laws, but thanks to the intuition and artistic taste of the photographer. They allow you to create a harmonious composition of the frame even at the moment of shooting. Naturally, whenever possible. If photographic intuition is well developed, then the photographs immediately turn out to be compositionally consistent and balanced. But even in this case, it is better to know which parts of the photograph the viewer pays close attention to and which parts are ignored. This knowledge allows you to more carefully and effectively compose the frame at the time of shooting, as well as search for these image objects that are so important for perception in the surrounding world. Or create them yourself.
As it turns out, in a photograph it is not always important HOW it is depicted, but WHAT is depicted. Therefore, many of the postulates of photo critics have no basis. Photo composition cannot be taught. It’s like an ear for music, either it exists (in principle, this can be easily verified), and it can and should be developed, or “the bear trampled” there, and here there is a direct road to technical part photography, the world of megapixels and focal lengths.
Masters of photography, who, although they have personal preferences for photographic equipment, shoot with anything from a point-and-shoot camera to the most advanced camera, get excellent results. What is their secret? This means that there is something that allows you to create masterpieces in photography, but according to some other laws, different from the written “laws of photographic composition”.
Let's summarize
1) To analyze a photograph, it must be viewed only as a whole.
2) In order to weed out the “not touching” pictures, you need to view them in a “short-term mode”, leaving only those that you remember.
3) There is no point in going into specific details of the image. It is an extremely rare situation when a photographer can arrange a frame from start to finish the way he needs it. All parts of the image are subjective in themselves and, apart from the entire composition of the photo, have no meaning. Like “drunk horizon”, “golden ratio”, bokeh or digital noise. And in principle, it is impossible to keep track of minor flaws such as the play of light, the nuances of human body movements. Therefore, you must either use the capabilities of Photoshop, or take the frame as it is.
There are things that are clearly perceived by the audience. Namely, semantic centers (the figure of a human animal, eyes, action, emotion). As well as such moments that are due to the physiology of our vision and the psychology of perception. Invariance, irradiation, rhythm, tunnel effect.
And there are things that are poorly perceived by the audience, which are described in the Three Rules of the photographer. But even here everything is not so simple, since it depends on the strength of the semantic centers. All this is in the articles numbered in the Photo School. The final choice of the background, frame borders, placement of objects in the picture, photographic effects - in any case, on the conscience of the photographer, his creative nature and personal preferences.
In any case, the photograph is presented to the viewer by a photographer who, on the one hand, likes it for various reasons, and on the other, only he has a CHOICE from many photographs that we will never see. In most cases, this is a conscious and not a random choice, and we must respect the taste, preferences and worldview of another person, even if we categorically do not accept something.
You need to be able to evaluate your photographs yourself.
Professionals are different from professionals. There are no universal objective evaluation criteria in photography, so it is not so much the evaluation itself that is important, but who is doing the evaluation. Different audiences evaluate the same photograph differently. Thus, the famous photograph of Andreas Gursky "Rhein II" () was most likely met with restraint on and not only there, which does not prevent this photograph from being the most expensive in the world. I saw how on some forum photographers were criticizing the famous (and, of course, good) photographs of Cartier-Bresson. Should we trust such estimates?
A photograph cannot be adequately assessed without knowing why it was taken and why it was made that way. There are two nuances here.
The first is that photography always gravitates towards some kind of aesthetics, in each of which the image is constructed and perceived according to its own principles. Roughly speaking, this is the aesthetics of the Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism and contemporary art. The aesthetics of the Renaissance is based on a figurative cipher (“the white rose is an emblem of sadness”), a literary component, and photography in such an aesthetic says something. The Baroque aesthetics is based on movement, blurred contours, fog, perspective, dynamics - everything that we usually love in pictures. The aesthetics of Impressionism is based on chromatic contrast. In the aesthetics of modern art, the basis of everything is the idea, which the viewer reads himself, and the artist and the image are generally secondary.
The second nuance is that if photography is applied (wedding, advertising, reportage, etc.), then it is important how the problem is solved. Aesthetics are secondary here. For example, on this link () two out of three photos are rather bad, although they look cool. And this is what () looks cool and very professional wedding photography. At first glance it looks ordinary, but take a closer look: all the pictures are good and to the point, there are no technical mistakes anywhere, everything is done in a single visual key, you get a solid impression of what is happening, the photographer does not show off in any way, 127 photographs do not have time to get boring.
So, how to evaluate your photos? The easiest way is to make friends on Facebook with about two dozen professionals who are reputable for you personally and work with images - be they photographers, art critics, filmmakers, artists, etc.: if at least one likes or comments something, then the photo is worth putting aside and review it in six months. The second criterion is if dozens of casually familiar people reacted to the photo within a few days.
The second way is to register on. The first resource is more poppy, but if the photo was included in the Editor's choice, that's good. If it became simply popular there, that's not bad. If it didn't make it and didn't, it's equally likely that the photo was so-so or just unlucky.
The question of what is Good photo, at first glance seems simple and does not require much thought. This is somewhat reminiscent of talking about the weather. Nobody thinks about what kind of weather is actually called good. Most will answer – when the sun is shining and it’s warm. Someone will say: “I love it when a light breeze blows.” The third one likes mushroom summer rain. And everyone is right! After all, as you know, nature has no bad weather!
With photography, too, the subjective factor plays a huge role here, since in the overwhelming case, what is being assessed is not the photograph as a product of fine art, but what is displayed on it. That’s why they like some pictures, but don’t even pay attention to others, turning over, say, the pages in a friend’s album, where the dog Bimka and classmates fooling around in the schoolyard are forever frozen; photographs from the agricultural detachment, where the owner of the album went as a student, and footage of him with some girls.
Vittorio Alinari. 1895. For many years, photographers were forced to imitate movements in the studio or outdoors. This happened due to the technical imperfection of photography - the low photosensitivity of photographic materials.
For many years, the conversation about good photography has been inextricably linked with the ability to qualify a specific image as a full-fledged work of fine art. If this did not happen, then critics perceived it only as a reproduction of a fragment of reality. It must be said that the very problem of evaluating photography as a unique form visual arts has been a topic of heated debate for many years.
Today this issue is not controversial - the largest museums in the world have their own photographic collections, photographic exhibitions attract crowds of visitors, photographs of old masters are sold at auctions for huge sums of money, monographs of famous photographers are published in substantial editions.
A hundred years ago the situation was clearly different. Supporters and opponents of photography were in constant confrontation, and the criteria for assessing photographic creativity were very far from those of today. And even those few who gave photography a modest place in the pantheon of arts put forward very strict conditions, under which photography could be considered an art.
The first condition that they imposed on a photograph claiming the right to be called a work of fine art was, at first glance, impossible to fulfill: like all works of art, this photograph had to be unique. A problem immediately arose: how could a photograph, whose undoubted advantage is the possibility of replication, be unique?
Secondly, it had to bear the imprint of the author’s individual skill, it had to be distinguished by his individual handwriting, the skill had to be visibly felt in it, in short, the photographer’s “handicraft” had to be visible. Therefore, the first photographs that began to be talked about as works of art were those that today we call pictorial photographs. That is, photographs whose authors based the creative principle of their creation on the principles that existed in traditional types of fine art.
Anna Brigman. 1907. Sample pictorial photograph. The names for such photographs were symbolic. This photo is called “The Soul of a Dead Tree”
How did photographers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries achieve the above requirements? They followed the path of creating a work that was as different as possible from ordinary documentary photography. Light painters who adhered to these criteria destroyed the natural documentary nature of the photographic image in every possible way, trying to obtain a “man-made” image as a result. It was impossible to completely repeat the print obtained in this way - it was truly unique in its own way. What kind of tricks did the pictorialist photographer have to go to in order to achieve his cherished goal!
All kinds of distorting optics, which made it possible to destroy the documentary accuracy of photography, unusual ways processing the negative, right down to outright retouching, but the main thing is endless experiments at the stage of the positive process - making a print. They didn’t come up with anything to make sure that the final product of the shooting didn’t look like an ordinary photograph. Various, now they are called alternative ways printing - “iron” and “platinum”, all kinds of dyes, and even simply previously unknown compounds replaced the usual photosensitive material - silver salts. Pigment and platinum printing, gum arabic and oil printing - bromoyl and bromoyl with transfer - were especially popular in Russia at that time, and, in addition, dozens of other now forgotten printing methods.
Labor-intensive, tedious, and not always and not immediately allowing you to get the desired result, they provided almost endless scope for creativity and... handicrafts! People who devoted themselves to the mystery of handicraft, in which something fundamentally different from the usual silver bromide print was created, inevitably began to treat ordinary photographers, whose activities, as is known, were limited only to shooting and processing photographic materials according to the technology strictly prescribed by the recipes.
Rudolf Koppitz. 1926. Another example of pictorial photography. An extremely contrived photograph, but there is undoubtedly some symbolic meaning behind the concept.
The works of the pictorialists, so different from the usual photographic prints, began to be valued as works of art. Art critics wrote about them in a few articles, however, and collectors, albeit timidly, began to ask the price of such prints, which so reminded them of painting and graphics.
This process became especially vigorous in the USA, where pictorialist photographers published their own magazine, and wealthy admirers of the new art very actively bought up their works, especially since the American amateur photographers themselves were very wealthy people, and photography for them, although a passionate hobby, but by no means a way to earn one’s daily bread.
The pictorialists were dismissive of the work of fellow photographers who adhered to the “traditional orientation” in photography and did not notice the documentary photography that was presented on the pages of the print media at all. This confrontation sometimes took the form of an open squabble - especially here were Russian photo artists prone to irreconcilable judgments.
In 1912, in St. Petersburg, in the halls of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, a large all-Russian photographic exhibition was opened, at which the works of a large number of domestic photographic artists, new equipment and photographic materials were presented. A representative of the royal family, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, a great lover of light painting, deigned to open this exhibition. The selection of works for the exhibition was very democratic - the exhibitor paid for the space occupied and could exhibit almost anything that he considered worthy of being presented to the public. Therefore, professionals, for whom this was a successful way to advertise their activities and attract the attention of potential customers, did not skimp on costs and tried to show as many photographs as possible. Amateurs, and among the pictorialists there were a majority of them, as a rule, could not afford to take up a lot of space, and were forced to make do with a limited exhibition area, but their stands were distinguished by an advantageous form of presenting photographic works - excellent frames, carefully selected for the passport.
Philip Halsman. 1948. To create an unusual portrait of Salvador Dali, the photographer had to resort to the help of several assistants. This picture is called "Dali Atomicus", which is a reference to the artist's painting "Atomic Leda" ("Leda Atomica") (the painting, unfinished at the time, is visible on the right). We can say that "Dali Atomicus" is an example of surrealism in photography. The work on the photograph took six hours, and Dali had to jump 28 times. After each take, the photographer retired to a dark room and developed the film, and the assistants cleaned up the studio, caught and calmed the cats. Soon the photographer came back and said guiltily: "Well, one more take" and everything was repeated from the beginning ...
The capital's press wrote a lot and favorably about the exhibition. But specialized magazines, especially those who considered themselves champions of “real art,” and therefore pictorial photography, took a fair amount of money out of the “documentary filmmakers.” Characteristic in this regard was the review of the famous Kyiv photographer Nikolai Petrov in those years, who wrote quite often on photography issues. Noting all the positive, from his point of view, aspects of the exhibition - the diversity of the exposition, the breadth of the geography of the authors represented - and praising a number of photo artists, he attacked the documentary photographers who presented reporter's work. The metropolitan master Karl Karlovich Bulla, whom the reviewer called "a cold artisan", especially got it. Looking ahead, it is worth saying that many pictorialists, about whom a longtime reviewer wrote favorably, are practically forgotten today, and Bulla’s documentary shots continue to live, despite the absence, according to the reviewer, of “any kind of artistry” in his works.
In the age-old dispute “Is photography art”, its opponents have always used a seemingly convincing argument, pointing out that, unlike traditional fine arts, there is no place in photography for “needlework”, in the process of which a work is created. Over time, the realization of the specifics of the creative act that underlies photography has come - it turned out to be selection. Selection of the situation, shooting subjects, choice of the very moment that in the best possible way reflected the author's idea of the subject, the ability to find an adequate way of telling about the surrounding reality. Thus, the creative act unambiguously migrated from the photo lab directly to the shooting location.
Peasat Lerski. 1929. The close-up and naturalistic texture of the face are typical of photographic portraits of the twenties. This style is especially typical of Soviet photography.
The twenties and thirties of the twentieth century were a time of stormy and very fruitful searches in photographic creativity. This is a return to “direct” photography, when the subject of photography remains reality itself in all its diversity, and photographers-artists experiment only with ways to show the world around them in a new way. The search for an unexpected form of displaying familiar things - unusual angles, the desire to capture the new materiality of objects - mastering the macrocosm of everyday objects, shooting extremely close-up portraits to reveal texture - all this is typical for the works of many masters in different countries.
At the same time, interest in social issues is increasing - photography becomes not just a record of reality, but by the very selection of material for photography, it tries to focus the public’s attention on certain problems, thereby giving an assessment of what is happening in the world.
“This means that, by its nature, the selection process among photographers is more aimed at revealing the content of the material than at its arbitrary interpretation,– writes Siegfried Kracauer, one of the researchers of the nature of photographic creativity. – The photographer, perhaps, is most like a thoughtful, imaginative reader, persistently searching for the meaning of an incomprehensible text.” And, according to one of the brightest masters of the early twentieth century, Edward Weston, the camera “allows you to look deeply into the nature of things and reveal their real essence in a photographic image.”
The selection of objects for shooting becomes decisive in the photography process, and laboratory processing fades into the background, becoming nothing more than necessary technological process. There is also a certain division of labor: the photographer-“shooter” and the photolaboratory-printer.
Indicative in this regard is the attitude towards the photographic work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, perhaps the most famous photographer XX century.
Henri Cartier-Bresson. 1951. The white gloves are the focal point of the photograph, but behind the photograph's undeniably sophisticated form lies a complex psychological narrative. For those who don’t know: the man with glasses is then still a young, but already fashionable photographer Richard Avedon
Bresson moved even further away from the “handicraft” - he fundamentally did not work in the laboratory: he did not develop film and did not print photographs - all this could be done by others. On this occasion he once remarked: “As a hunter, I love to hunt, but I don’t like to cook game. This is a different profession!” When submitting negatives for printing, he demanded one thing from the laboratory assistant: “Only print what is on the negative! No framing, no handicraft".
A photograph, in his opinion, is created at the moment when the photographer presses the shutter.
This is the creative act - the choice of the "decisive moment" and the ability to pull the trigger at the right time. The editor of the album, called "The Decisive Moment", will force him to think about this somehow. The album that made him famous all over the world and helped many to choose their own path in photography. Bresson is not a philosopher or a theoretician in the conventional sense, but with all his work he formulated certain postulates that determined the existence of direct creative photography. “Everything in the world has its decisive moment”, - once said one now forgotten cardinal.
Henri Cartier-Bresson. 1968. The “Hippodrome” shot is another confirmation of the photographer’s amazing ability to convey a subtle psychological situation in a surprisingly elegant form.
This is exactly what the photographer captured and all his creative life recorded these “decisive moments.” In doing this, he never thought of specifically creating "beautiful" photographs, but he always sought to capture the essence of the situation, and if he succeeded in this, the photograph necessarily became beautiful. After all, a good photograph is a documentary image of a fragment of reality, aesthetically adequate to the depicted situation and nothing more. In photography, as, indeed, in any other arts, form is only a way of conveying content. And if something is done only for the sake of form, the work cannot be complete.
That is why Bach, Rembrandt and Shakespeare are eternal, and many artists did not survive their time - they were captive of momentary “fashionable” aesthetic attitudes, and form for them was more important than content.
I would like to hope that Bresson’s photographs will live forever, because there is no deliberateness in them, there is nothing that the public likes and makes them exclaim: “Oh, how was this done?!!!” They are incredibly simple, like the scenes captured on them, and therefore many at one time passed by his photographs, as they wander through life, not noticing what the eye of the photographer stops at, recreating on a sheet of photographic paper some “second reality”, through which we better understand the world around us.
Time has shown that he was wrong - he did not have such photographs.
By the middle of the twentieth century, theorists reflecting on the features and specifics of reproductive types of creativity finally came to realize the fact that this or that type of creativity can only be full-fledged if the qualities characteristic of this particular type of creativity are fully realized in it. type of creativity.
The well-known film theorist Siegfried Krakauer, in his book The Nature of Film, with a very accurate subtitle "Rehabilitation of Physical Reality", based on a historical analysis of the evolution of photographic creativity, formulated what he figuratively called the "natural tendencies" of photography. According to the author of the book, there are four of them:
“First. Photography clearly gravitates towards unstaged reality. Pictures are truly photographic when they feel the intention of the author to reproduce the physical reality in the untouched form in which it exists outside of him ...
Second. The attraction of photography to unstaged reality determines its tendency to emphasize elements of the casual, random, and unexpected. Random events are the best food for photographs...
Third. Photographs tend to convey a sense of incompleteness, infinity, arising from emphasizing the elements of randomness, which in the photograph ... are captured more partially than completely. A photograph is good only when it does not leave the impression of completeness. The frame of a photo frame is only its conditional boundaries; its content is connected with the content of what remains outside the frame; his composition speaks of something inconceivable - about physical existence...
Fourth and last. Photography tends to convey a feeling of vague content, semantic ambiguity...”
Henri Cartier-Bresson. 1969."Kiss". Bresson's works always capture the peak of the situation - the “decisive moment.” And almost always it is not only the action itself, but also an adequate reaction to it
The intuitive awareness of these truths, which is increasingly taking root in the minds of both the photographers themselves and a certain part of its consumers, has led to a natural process of informal division of photography into two large spheres: “direct” photography, which is based on direct recording of the surrounding reality and “made "(organized, conceptual, etc. - the name is unsettled). Bresson said: “All photographers are divided into two categories: some invent photographs, others observe life. I belong to the latter.” Naturally, evaluation criteria for different areas of photography become different.
As for “made” photography, since this type of photographic creativity has a very relative relation to photojournalism, we will leave the analysis of its assessments for the future, and focus on “direct” photography.
From all of the above, we can conclude that the criteria for evaluating photography must be built on the basis of views formed during the historical process of the evolution of photography as a type of fine art. Since photography is a reproductive form of creativity, which is based on technology, the technical capabilities of the latter undoubtedly at times had a noticeable impact on the assessment of photography, and at times they were completely forgotten.
Daguerre. 1838. Boulevard du Temple. In the first photographic images of city landscapes, no people are visible - long exposures did not allow them to capture moving objects. This photograph is unique - a slightly blurry human figure is captured on the lower left. As you understand, the boulevard in Paris was not so deserted at that time.
For example, daguerreotypes - the first photographic images - had a number of imperfections. One of them was that the image in the picture turned out to be mirrored, and everything changed its location. When depicting a landscape, its right side became the left and vice versa. But this did not bother anyone, since the vast majority of viewers could not see the area in the original and did not notice this error. But in the case of a portrait, the right hand was on the left, and the left hand on the right. The viewer could well not pay attention to this detail. But when the image of the person being portrayed contained certain details, the location of which was strictly defined - for example, different position buttons for men's and women's clothing, orders and attributes of uniforms, for which there were stable rules for wearing them, and other details - this, naturally, could not be ignored. They soon got used to this, just as they get used to seeing their reflection in the mirror. And this defect began to be taken for granted.
Something similar happened in the case of typos from the wet collodion era, in which the clouds were practically not worked out, which is why the sky in landscape photographs remained gaping white. What they also did not pay attention to was accepting this convention of the image.
The streets of even the most populated cities on the planet in photographs of this time in most cases turn out to be deserted - during long exposures, moving figures were not recorded on photographic plates, only occasionally leaving blurry outlines. And this also did not bother anyone particularly. These were a kind of “rules of the game”, accepted by the audience without reservations.
Dalton. 1988. The ability of photography to capture what the human eye does not have time to see is amazing. Who would have thought that this leopard frog could be so graceful?
In the first years, the very fact of the photographic image of many objects aroused admiration - the viewer had not previously been able to see a documentary accurate image of many objects that were outside the field of his direct contact. For example, a viewer who had never seen an elephant could admire its image, and most of the inhabitants, who did not look closely at a fly or a mosquito, were amazed at their macro images. It was the era of general photographic inventory of the surrounding world. And often then it was not the aesthetic merits of the image that were evaluated, but the very fact of its receipt.
Further development of technology - increasing the light sensitivity of the negative material, the invention of the shutter - made it possible to fix the movement. This is how “instant photography” appeared - such a signature could at one time be found in photographic magazines under photographs that depicted situations in dynamics. IN English language then the stable term “snap shot” appeared, denoting this kind of photographic images. At first, such photographs were perceived as nothing more than a curiosity, and they were usually taken by amateur photographers using small portable cameras. The image quality obtained by these devices left much to be desired, but such images turned out to be very natural, because they captured life in motion.
New technical improvements changed the nature of photography and greatly expanded its capabilities - reportage photography was born.
Marcey Krull. 1926. An unusual angle is an integral attribute of avant-garde photography of the 20-30s of the twentieth century. This vision of objects was greatly facilitated by the emergence of convenient portable cameras and light-sensitive photographic materials that do not require a tripod for shooting
The ability to capture the surrounding reality in the process of its constant change has revolutionized photography - from now on it has become able to realize its "natural inclinations", which we spoke about above. It was instant photography that allowed mankind to see much of what it had not paid attention to until now. Scientists have received a tool for fixing fast processes, and artists have finally paid attention to the charm of momentary situations that they still could not see. Instead of invented staged plots, photography made it possible to show life in all its diversity and nature. And if the criteria that were used in evaluating traditional fine art were somehow still suitable for the former static light painting, then the new photograph had to be evaluated in a new way.
In addition, if before that photography was predominantly a visual medium, then its new potentials revealed the narrative possibilities of the image. That is why photography has become the most active way to realize oneself in journalism. At first she only illustrated text materials, but very soon it turned out that she also had an independent informative ability. A photograph, accompanied by a brief commentary, became an independent carrier of information. The information was visual, documented, accurate and imaginative, which made it especially convincing. This was most clearly manifested in series of photographs, which, unlike a single image, themselves became a type of pictorial speech.
Hammarskeld. 1965. Contemporary photography everything is subject to control. Or almost everything. If anything, it may perpetuate an extraordinary movement.
All of the above already allows us to assert that the possibilities of photographic images not only went beyond the creative potential of works of fine art, but were fundamentally different from them in their documentary nature, accessibility of perception, democracy, dictated by the apparent simplicity of creation and amazing communication abilities.
It is not without reason that one of the most prominent photographers and curators of the 20th century, Edward Steichen, who lived for almost a century and devoted many decades to photography, made an amazing conclusion at the end of his career. “When I started photography, A. Rodchenko. 1924. Famous photograph Soviet avant-garde photographer “Portrait of a Mother” is known throughout the world. In those years, she was striking in unusually close-up images. Some attribute this to the capabilities of the Leika camera, which appeared in 1925. But this is not so; the photographer got this camera much later. The photo was taken with a 9x12 format camera. Moreover, the image of the head occupied only a small space on the plate (less matchbox) Part. Rodchenko’s innovation was that he chose a frame from a generally banal image on a negative close-up, which became an object of imitation and a characteristic technique in photography of the 20-30s.
Modern photography is surprisingly multifaceted - it has enormous aesthetic possibilities and never ceases to delight viewers with the documented beauties of the world around us, and at the same time it has the power to draw our attention to the obvious abominations of our world. She still reveals to us what the human eye has never seen before; due to her unique ability to capture fleeting situations, she is able to draw our attention to those facts of reality that we constantly pass by, and thereby contributes to the expansion of our worldview.
Being the first of the technical arts, it constantly improves its instrumental reserves, thereby opening the way to new creative horizons. Digital photography made a new revolution in this process, significantly simplifying it and giving millions of people the opportunity to join the most democratic form of fine art. The technical capabilities of the Internet have opened up previously unknown prospects for the use of photography. One thing is clear - having gone beyond the obvious materiality that it possessed in the previous decades of its existence, it acquired a new virtual quality and the ability to instantly spread, becoming a full-fledged part of the noosphere, helping humanity to penetrate deeper into not only the essence of physical, but also spiritual processes.
The variety of forms and ways of reflecting our reality, and in Lately and the possibility of creating some new reality, does not allow us to talk about the possibility of identifying universal criteria for assessing all forms of photographic creativity. Photography today is becoming almost as multifaceted as the life it recreates or replaces. Today we find ourselves in such a fast-moving stream, where static coordinates turn out to be incapable of fully assessing our movement, and new ones are not yet visible.
Any beginner, having taken a certain number of frames, asks the question: Are the photographs I took good or not?!
In search of an answer, the teapot turns to websites and VKontakte groups, asking them to criticize the photo and point out shortcomings. There is no need to say that our hero firmly believes in the masterpiece of his creations.
And when critics attack him, the world of our newcomer begins to burst at the seams and unravel before our eyes.
I am a member of several public pages and am a rather vicious critic who regularly gives fairly harsh reviews to other people’s photographs, which is why aspiring photographers begin to get frustrated and run to complain to the local administration about me.
However, any beginner can avoid such frustration if he is honest with himself and independently evaluates his photo, looking at it with an unbiased look. So, let's talk about how you can and should evaluate your photos yourself.
In general, after several years of photography, I can notice that without being able to independently and self-critically evaluate my photographs, I can become a good photographer it won't work out in principle.
How to evaluate your photos yourself and subject them to your own criticism?!
Once I already pointed out that the quality of any photograph can be considered in two planes: technical and artistic.
The easiest and most convenient way to evaluate your own photographs is on a technical level. Just check the photo at:
- Overexposure / overexposure / glare / “hares”
- Holes in the shadows
- The exhibition as a whole
- Horizon line / horizontal and vertical lines in the frame
- Amount of digital noise
- Lack/too much contrast
- Proper framing/composition
In artistic terms, everything is much more complicated. You need to honestly answer a few basic questions:
- What feelings does this photo evoke!?
- Does it evoke any emotions in me?!
- Is there a balance between subjects, objects and plans in the photograph?!
- Are there any foreign objects or objects that are so unnecessary for this photograph?!
And when you are sure that everything is in order with your photo technically, as well as artistically, then you can safely post it “for criticism” on social networks or on specialized sites.
True, I must warn you right away that there will not be many comments, because from the technical side there is no fault, but from the artistic side this is, perhaps, your vision of our harsh reality. The number of likes will greatly depend on the popularity and traffic of a particular public page, which leads to the idea that their number cannot serve as any determining factor.
I advise you not to pay attention to the number of likes, because one full-fledged detailed comment, no matter positive or negative, will have a much greater impact on your development in photography than a bunch of nameless likes from who knows who, with who knows what taste.
You just need to listen to this comment and soberly assess what exactly the person wanted to tell you. Ultimately, this is exactly the viewer of your photographs for whom you took photographs in the first place.
Yes, and I know that you haven’t thought about it.
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