June 2009
Young photographers involved in artistic photography tend to fall into the same sins, which is understandable. Recognizing these weaknesses certainly helps in addressing them.
First and foremost, the young photographer wants to distance themselves from commemorative photography, which deals with "beloved" subjects, and from hobbyist photography, which deals with "beautiful" subjects. Consequently, their interest often turns to unfamiliar subjects, thus becoming an observer, and to insignificant details that are not at risk of being criticized as beautiful, becoming a recorder. However, as an observer and recorder of the trivial and the mundane, they can no longer claim any other interest or propose any other goal than the form itself, that is, the composition.
If they realize this contradiction, they turn - increasingly nowadays - to thought that will replace visual interest. Thus, we unintentionally become viewers of numerous photographs depicting something the photographer thought of. However, any thought compressed into a fraction of a second and onto a piece of paper is bound to be superficial, rudimentary, and rather naive. Naturally, this leads to the multiplication of these fractions, the centimeters, and the photographs, so the thought becomes as legible as possible.
The dominance of color further complicated matters because its realism is more likely to refer to the familiar and the beautiful, and the effort to avoid these easily leads to minimalist and stylized forms or to thoughts of advertising slogans. On the other hand, black and white assumed the unexpected role of the more artistic form since its processing allows for extremes that color cannot withstand. Digital technology, with its conveniences and the belief that everything is possible and supportable, has brought even greater confusion to the minds of young photographers who now lack even the limits of technique as a reference point.
The answers, as always, are seemingly simple yet essentially difficult and complex. Above all, beloved subjects and beauty never ceased to be goals and content of artistic photography. If the subject does not move the photographer, it is unlikely to move the viewer, given that a work of art is primarily a carrier of poetic intensity, not information. However, the photographer must transform their motives and invest them with the uniqueness and beauty of the photographic language. But also, a detail cannot be interesting on its own unless it speaks indirectly, abstractly, and succinctly about a whole that the photographer sees but the viewer does not. What the artist photographer knows while the hobbyist ignores is that no event, no beauty, and no thought are of interest to art unless they are transformed into a photographic event, photographic beauty, or photographic thought. The insistence on a goal and the repetition of related photographs is not an effort to underscore and project a thematic approach, an ideological belief, or a morphological finding, but rather the search for and birth of a similar emotion. The value of persistence and repetition lies in the multiplication of the emotional intensity they provoke.
However, it is a fact that the attainment of artistic maturity always passes through sins. It suffices for these to have the gift of sincerity. Because poetic emotion cannot exist without it.
Plato Rivellis