These are my two favorite images by Carl Weese in his series of photographs of drive-in theaters. I was reading a New York Times blurb that went along with a slideshow of his images and a quote by Carl really stood out to me.
“I’m not going to get a turned head to think that I made the most wonderful photograph in the world,” Mr. Weese said. “It had to be resonance with the subject matter.”
I am unsure about this statement. If you are hauling around an 8 x 10 camera aren’t you trying to create a wonderful, stunning photograph. I believe a few of these images are stunning but then others fall flat. It is a mistake to consider this a purely documentary endeavor when you are clearly interested in aesthetics.
p.s. If you go to his website his images have art sauce borders (art sauce = decorative crap that is superfluous to a good photograph) but the NYT slides have cropped them out.
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“Art Sauce” is actually a pretty good term for artificial treatments added in Photoshop. However the drive-in galleries on my site show images scanned from hand-coated Pt/Pd prints. The black edges, like the paper texture, are part of the process, not make-believe junk added in the computer.
Platinum printing fans like to see the full print with borders, but I thought that might be visually confusing to the uninitiated, so I gave The Times files scanned directly from the negatives—they look more like the digital prints I also make from this work.
The point of that quote, btw, which got a bit truncated, is that when so many people react so strongly to a picture, it’s a good bet that it’s not entirely due to the photographer’s visual brilliance, but also indicates some special resonance the viewers are feeling with the subject matter. Picking subjects that viewers resonate with is, of course, a good idea.
Carl, Thank you for commenting, and to an extent calling me out on some of my maybe poorly thought out tirades. The full print with borders stems from the community surrounding platinum prints that I am not connected to while I come from an art school environment where that is used for much shallower reasons. I think my comment there is due to the two of us coming from very different backgrounds so I appreciate that you made me aware of this. Secondly, I have experienced first-hand how quotes can be taken out of context and misunderstood so your comment about the quote definitely clarifies your statement. I sense that you were almost surprised by the response to the work and were stating that it must have something to do with the cultural history behind the drive-in theatre. But I guess my comment there was because I do ‘want you to get a turned head for making the most beautiful photograph’. Maybe the quote came off as dismissive of your capabilities as an artist and placed too much responsibility for the images success purely upon the content. Sorry, I am kind of thinking out loud. Again, Thank you for commenting.
Jessica, I agree with you about the misuse of “treatments” like phony borders. In fact, I put up those galleries…it must be 6 or 7 years ago. The use of fake borders has exploded since then. My most recent postings of this work, on my blogs and in a new large gallery linked from my web site, use the same presentation as The Times LENS blog. I could consider taking down the old gallery pages showing the platinum prints as they are, to avoid being misunderstood, but that would feel too much like letting the turkeys win
In fact I’ve moved toward digital printing for this body of work over the past five years, for a different reason. This particular subject matter is so rich in detail–both the structures and the surrounding landscapes–that larger prints than contact size can be very rewarding. Things that I was aware of while shooting, but that nobody has ever noticed in a 7×17-inch contact print, come leaping into view in a 36-inch wide digital print.
Something that I may still not have gotten across well is that I don’t think it in any way diminishes the role of the artist to acknowledge the power of subject matter. Conceptual Art bugs me almost as much as phony borders. The trick, I think, is to combine the subject and the artistic perception and craft to come up with a result that will reward a viewer’s close attention.
A very, very slender border around photographs printed from film – photographs printed as color coupler prints or gelatin silver prints – means something wonderful, in my humble opinion: it’s a boast, indicating the photographer got the frame *exactly* right on film.
True, but. I think it depends on what kind of photography you are doing. Yes, the frame edge proves technical accuracy but when pursuing an artistic vision what changes upon cropping? In general I do think it is something to use sparingly and to compose in camera. I shoot film for this reason, because personally I shoot sloppy when I use a digital camera.