Originality...

[bboss]

I was just thinking about originality in photos and was wondering whether it is a useful or important quality.
Does it exist? Can it exist?
Is it necessary, in some degree, for a quality image?
If so, how can we measure it?
Should we aim for it?
Does too much make an image unintelligible?
Is there any point thinking about such an obscure concept?

If anyone has any thoughts on these difficult questions, I am very interested.

[sohrab]

this is a very good topic david
i guess i have my views and they're very subjective
i think originality does exist, but even without originality a photograph can be great

when i say that originality does exist i'm not being very strict about the term "original" because nobody has any idea of all the photographs that are being taken all around the world. we normally get to see the works of only the well established photographers, and that too of just some of them. so while i might think that a person is original , because i've never seen anyone with a style of photography similar to his/her's there might be some more photographers with a similar style shooting elsewhere who i don't know about.

it is easy to say that in the earlier days of photography, you could get lots of original stuff, but now that lots of photographs are already there, it's difficult to think of anything original. it seems really difficult but maybe it's just that we are so accustomed to seeing what we already see that we can't look beyond it.
take a look at TE itself....

"can we measure originality???"

i don't think so.. you just know that something is original or atleast has some hint of originality, but i don't think we can measure how original it is.

"should we aim for it??"

ofcourse........ but not at the cost of just shooting aimlessly.
even a different perspective to the same thing can be original.
i don't know about the others, but personally, i get bored of shooting the same thing in the same way very easily and i need to experiment.
also as a viewer too i get bored quite easily.
at the moment steve mccurry bores me ( although he's one of my favorites) but i've had a little too much of his style now, and need something different. only then can i appreciate mccurry's photographs again later.
( no offence meant to the great photographer here)

"does too much make an image unintelligible"

difficult question to answer..
i'll be tempted to say "not at all" but maybe it just depends on how the viewer sees something. so in that sense this is very subjective. while i might find something original and intelligent, someone might just find it nonsense. so in that sense even originality becomes subjective doesn't it?
for example have a look at trent parke or michael ackerman

i don't know if to many people will appreciate their photographic styles. they're both new and they're style is quite different. i would say original. maybe originality needs time to be appreciated.

"is there any point thinking about such an obscure topic?"

ofcourse there is, if people didn't think about this, i don't think photography or anything else would have progressed.

just my own thoughts and they're quite biased :)
take care

[bboss]

Hi Sohrab, and thanks for replying - it looks like we are the only 2 members who have any interest in this topic, so I may as well let you know what I think.

Broadly speaking I agree with everything you say - and yes our views are subjective, originality is a subjective concept.

A few things have occurred to me...
Photography differs from other disciplines as it is (essentially) representational. Obviously we can have art photos or works of art that include a photographic element, but these are different from what we mean by photography, which involves some element of representation of the world.
This affects the concept of progress - in painting you can have the development from representational to impresssionist to cubist etc, but this is not relevant to photography.
In photography progress seems to be associated more with the technical developments
(daguerreotype - black and white - colour - digital etc). Progress and originality are inseparable, equally difficult concepts.
There seems to be a movement exploring the boundaries of the representational image - (you mention Ackerman for example) - and this is interesting (philosophically if not visually). As these boundaries get pushed further then, once a limit has been reached, then the result will be unintelligible. This is, as you say, going to be a personal limit which will differ from one viewer to another.
This has worrying implications for originality, in that its a fine line between being sufficiently different from anything we have seen to be original, but not so different as to be unintelligible.
And then there is style.
Style is the antithesis of originality. What I mean is that if a photographer has a certain something that makes his/her photos recognizable, then this very same thing that prevents the next image from being original. This is difficult as a style may be original. Your mccurry example is a good one. Maybe he has an original style but you are bored of it because he sticks to it too much. That is to say that he is making unoriginal photos within an original style.
So is it the style or the image that should be original? There is no answer to this, but there must come a point where one is parody of oneself, and I guess that especially as a respected professional it must be even harder to try something new rather than stick with your usual winning formula, there is more to lose. (I am not thinking of mccury here by the way). The flip side is that maybe this stylistic something is exactly the thing we should strive for, not originality of each image.

Also maybe we need to think about distinction between originality of subject or originality of style, or originality of technique.

and yes, originality needs time to be appreciated, or to be got used to at least.

I am still not convinced that we can get anything out of thinking about this stuff, but it helps use up the hours...

Cheers
David

[Luko]

Photography differs from other disciplines as it is (essentially) representational. Obviously we can have art photos or works of art that include a photographic element, but these are different from what we mean by photography, which involves some element of representation of the world.
This affects the concept of progress - in painting you can have the development from representational to impresssionist to cubist etc, but this is not relevant to photography.

I will not agree with that definition, David. The essence of photography is not representational but mostly for me related to TIME, this is the great originality of photography over painting or sculpture which is representational in 2D or 3D but doesn't include any element of the 4th dimension and also over cinema/video which doesn't distort time as photo (but has movement as its essence). it's no secret why the decisive instant theory has had so much sucess : if you read HCB himself, he considers time as the most important factor in photography.
Yes, at first painters were concvinced photography would steal their business until pictorialism showed a new way to photography.

but where does it lead us? back to originality and "style". French philosopher Barthes analysed photography as a viewer and found to things in it :
- the studium or all information or artistic messages a that are common and received as such by readers. Very roughly, you could say that a still with no specific lighting or such a corny David Hamilton like lighting is entirely studium, nothing more than information ( (the objects of the still) and the déjà vu been there done/seen that art (David Hamilton). in a way Steve McCurry's photos might be qualified like mainly studium.
- The punctum : something that points to you, like a needle ripping into your heart. the originality of the image that speaks to you personnally, from your experience, your rememberings or your own likings.... and that's different from one image to another, no matter about the general studium.

Why do I explain that? I think Barthes shows that the true explanation of anyone's value in photography has nothing to do with something we would call style (as a recognizable artistic style, but more at individual level (also at a time level because Barthes has previsouly calimed that the essence of photography was that "this was once" and hence feelings had to cope with this piece of time coming back.)

Was I clear enough? No, never mind.. but it's late also, I'm going to sleep...

cheers
Luko

[philip_coggan]

Thanks for starting this thread david.

Luko: Can I be cruel to M. Barthes? He is elitist. He says (or you explain that he says) that the 'stadium' consists of commonly-held information. Death to Mr Hamilton and all those who take photos of sunsets. And he says that it's punctum, the needle, that will pierce through the armourplate of commonness. But...well, people (I mean real people, the world of boulot-metro-dodo) LIKE stadium. That's why Mr Hamilton is rich from the sale of his books, and why people hang calendars with sunsets on their bedroom walls (apart from a desire to know what day it is each morning they wake up, until the final morning when they don't).

Because the armourplate is a protection against a reality which is frequently far from pleasant. Boulot metro, the common lot of modern Western man.

When I'm in Cambodia and Burma I'm forever meeting people who long to have the life they believe I have in Australia - a TV and a motorcar and a holiday each year. When I'm in Oz I meet people who long to get away to a beach someplace and escape their humdrum lives. One man's studium is another man's punctum.

[kikvel]

difficult concepts to define since quite a long time to me...still very confusing...

At the time being I like when I am not recognized...this means having no style...I am still exploring, and I like it this way.

Why would I wish to have a style? To feel confident? To get comfortable about what I am shooting? To improve my skills?

What is right or wrong?
I guess there should be an effort to see things from a new perspective, from a different point of view than usual.

Information is important to human beings. Otherwise we would easily stand in front of a white wall and stare it for hours and hours...Normally we would not do it. So I guess that the "change" is important, this change brings out new information for you and your viewers...

The objects are the same, nothing is new under the sun, rocks, mountains, people...everything is exactly the same and revealed to everyone. It is the way the photographer grabs reality that counts.
This extracts new information from what is already there and nobody cares.

And also the synchronization of events, actions and places that can only be achieved in photography.

Difficult to define,

Interesting topic

K.

[Luko]

It is told there are 9 ways to misunderstand oneself through communication just help yourself. I don't know which one but it looks like we're wandering deep inside one of these paths.

There's no such appreciation such as commonness or originality in Barthes... his thoughts are about individual understanding and feelings on images. You must start the analysis at "signs" (semiotics) level not at "history of art level" (although I admit my explanation was not clear enough, on the other hand I have the excuse I was sleepy too ;-)...as for yourself go and get your cup of coffee, Philip...).

I'll do it once again. Barthes says there are two different things in photo, as well as in any image :

- First is the stUdium (with a U like in "studies", not a A like "people running in small shorts") consists in messages that will be understood by any person, these can be either shapes ("Oh, it's oblong, fruity and yellowy green it looks like a pear... it should be a pear, yes it is a pear!" it can appear very mundane but it needs education to understand that a 2D image is in fact a 3D thing : remember "This is not a pipe".), artistical/cultural references that are well known (Barthes wrote long before Hamilton was a pain in the neck, I selected the example to let you imagine : "oh, there's a kind of light mist around that teenager girl.. it looks ethereal like dreams, yes, I got it! that guy meant to represent romantism... that's it, that's teenage romantism." :( ... see why I was refereing to David Hamilton... his artistics effects are so commonly used and significant they become general knowledge rather than individual level), or categories/genres like landscapes, people photo, war photos, macro, etc.
You can use studium to describe a photo : for instance, it's a still of a hamiltonish teenage pear. Do I belittle something there? No...these are simple cultural facts but I can now figure the photo though I did not give it any artistic/emotional value, is it good, bad, do I appreciate it and why, we still don't have the clue...
That's why you can't say that people LIKE studium, they only understand it.. the liking part is about PUNCTUM.

- The punctum will add the personal or emotional relationship you have with this specific photo. "I hate it because David Hamilton wore ridiculous shirts", "It reminds me the pear I ate after having sex for the first time, and both were good", "Because of that pear, I'm now the owner of 50000 hectares of peartree orchards and the first pear producer in the world", "the light on the pear looks like a hitchcockian move, I'm thrilled", etc. All these are punctums, you can notice it's a very individuel level, even though one can have these feelings altogether.

I believe the studium and punctum concepts are good tools one should have in mind to comment photographs... at least this is one I have when I criticize images in TrekEarth : where's my punctum, what can I say about the studium?

a link worth reading :
reading a photograph (and the importance of the story inside)


Cheers
Luko

[sohrab]

"Photographs are never clear by themselves"

boy!! am i glad to know that i'm not the only one :)

luko this is a very interesting page. i've bookmarked it and will read it fully some time later, am studying at the moment.

since i read the recent posts here in a hurry, i'm not sure if i got everything. but just to clarify....

if i say that your affinity for photographs with backs and transportation is punctum
am i right when i say this??
this is just to see if i've got the essence of the 2 terms properly
thanks

[Luko]

if i say that your affinity for photographs with backs and transportation is punctum
am i right when i say this??"

Mmmh... yes and no.

Because punctum is at individual level, reader and photo wise.

I mean, yes there's a chance it will be my punctum on a specific photo, I will think "Hey, that's a shot that reminds me that island in the Philippines and the moment that guy I saw from behind was waving at a fishing boat coming back to the harbor" or I'm into that scene, like I am living it...

Otherwise it could be no, because people back do not necessarily appeal to me... I could also say "hey, that's a people-from-the-back image" and that would be studium purely.

I know it can sound very theoretical, but one of the qualities of the tool is that it gives you some own discipline to organize your reading.

[bboss]

This is very interesting stuff, Luko, about the Studium and Punctus, and any tool that we can use to interpret images has got to be useful, although I am not sure how far we can go with this one.
'Reading photographs is personal, and inevitably so. Such reading depends on one's upbringing, culture, interests, preferences as well as dislikes; it is also subjected to one's moods.' - this is obviously completely right, but it neglects the fact that we have shared emotional responses, to some degree at least, and these are really the important ones, because without this shared experience there really could be no communacation possible on an emotional level which is what photography is all about. It is certainly true that these feelings are experienced individually, but it is the fact of their commonality that is interesting and ignored by the Bathes approach. Understanding what is happening in the viewer is important, but its not even close to the whole story.
Also, if Bathes is trying to explaining what is happening in the viewer then he should have something to say about originality and style, as the recognition of originality and style are experiences perceived in the individual viewer.

But really these are side issues - although its good to think about meaning, I do not think its relevant to our understanding of originality and its relative, style, as these exist in a different area, unrelated to emotional meaning.

OK - so maybe I can reframe the question in a different way.
If I go into an art gallery and I see some pictures, if there is a Picasso there the chances are very good that I will recognize it, even if I have never seen it before. So what are the qualities that make that picture recognizable to me?
(or a HCB photo, or a piece of Bach, whatever - if its true for one it will be true for all).
Is the style definable? or not?
Both have serious implications, but first we have to work out what are the important characteristics which make the unseen picture recognizable.
Any thoughts anyone?