What is the Big Deal?

Now might be a good time to take a look at what exactly is going on in a photograph and get down to what it's all about. Why take photographs? Why make the effort to get up early and go through all the trouble to take a picture? It's just a picture! They're cheap and easy and everybody can take a picture with their phone these days, so why would anyone want to go to school for it, or even worse, dedicate a life to it? And for what? To take pictures of a nasty old tarp laying on the ground? Bravo! There are tools which lay sharp in the shed...and there are stars which shine brightly in the sky...actually I forget that metaphor. It's, "not the sharpest tool in the shed" and, "not the brightest...bulb in the sugar patch"? Anyways, I digress.


So, what's so great about a crumpled up tarp carelessly tossed on the pavement in an alley in some town no one's ever heard of? Well, I find it interesting, probably due to some faulty wiring, but I find it interesting nonetheless because of the play of order vs. disorder and man vs. nature going on in the photograph. The foundation of this photograph is based on the order and sharpness of the squares and rectangles in the background, of which there are many, created by the garage doors (see photo below, I highlighted a few) and the formless disorder of the tarp in the foreground.

What is also interesting is that most everything in this photo is synthetic and man-made. Even the organic form of the tarp is at odds with the synthetic material of which it is made. The only natural things in the photo are the few blades of grass poking through the cracks in the pavement and the small wood board laying on the tarp, but even that is only natural by material and is still a man-made object.

Now, that is only the foundation of the photo. From there the next step is to hopefully capture some sense of place and/or character. And beyond that, if the photo is to be really successful, it has to communicate some form of mood or feeling. It really is a visual language. Just as words are symbols for thoughts and concepts, so too can be the aesthetic elements of photos. Both have their shortcomings and are by no means a perfect and complete way to communicate, but it is these quirks that make them interesting in their own right and it is the mystery of the thoughts which make them so fascinating, scary, and exciting to attempt to express.

In the end, I think this photograph is most successful in its "intellectual" foundation and it is fairly successful in communicating a sense of place. Where it falls short is in communicating any really interesting mood. Hopefully that's just my bias being the one who took the picture. When I took it I was feeling pretty ambivalent. I was just kind of taking pictures of interesting looking stuff. Then later in post-production I felt like I had to try and form it into some sort of "mood" and to me that awkwardness is apparent, or at least is responsible for making this photo not as good as it could have been.  But that is o.k. Not every photograph needs all of those elements to be successful. Some photographs just need to be about what they are about. Some photographs are just about texture, or just about mood, and lack in the other areas. That's perfectly acceptable. The problem comes in when, like I did with this photograph, you try to shape it into something it's not. So, in the end, what makes a "successful" photograph is accurately portraying a sense of the subject. It's what the "listening", "feeling", and "looking" is about. It's more difficult than it sounds, but that is why you get up and do it again and again...