A day or two ago I came across a link to a feature on the Danish Press photography site, Pressefotografforbundet, which was an English translation of an earlier post about the Danish Pictures of the Year competition. Klavs Bo Christensen who had sent in pictures on a story he shot in Haiti had been asked by the judges to submit his RAW files for the images concerned, and they had then decided to disqualify his work.
The competition rules state that pictures entered:
“must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression.”
Having seen the work – which is on the site – I’m surprised that it’s disqualification has aroused any controversy. It clearly – at least to my eyes – goes far beyond what I would consider “a truthful representation” and takes the work more in to the province of illustration rather than of photography. Had I been one of the judges I would have turned it down as inappropriate without feeling the need to examine the RAW files.
RAW files are not of course image files, and need suitable processing. In the article this is done as a comparison to the submitted images using the default setting of Adobe Camera Raw, and clearly a little more is needed on all three images shown. Unless I’m in a tearing hurry, I seldom accept the default ‘Autotone‘ result from Lightroom. As I used to in the darkroom, I’ll often do a little dodging and burning, and with the digital file I’ll usually also take advantage of the ease with which you can open up the shadows a little. The default settings often compress the highlights rather more than I like, and again I’ll correct this. And the auto setting normally fails to produce either high key or low key images and should I have been aiming at these effects, a more drastic tonal rearrangement is called for.
I may not get it right, but my aim is always to produce images that look photographic, where the viewer essentially isn’t aware of the process but in a sense feels they are looking through the picture to what is depicted, retaining the essence of the photograph as some kind of a trace of the original scene. For me the photograph is very much a ‘window’, although I always felt that Szarkowski was totally wrong to suggest that it could not at the same time be a powerful ‘mirror.’
Of course it has always been possible to use photography in different ways, for example to give a negative of the scene, or to solarize or posterize the image. But such graphic effects are designed very much to distance the photographically produced images from the original photographic expression, what we might call an experimental approach rather than the realist approach that is central to photojournalism and documentary work.
So I’m 100% behind the judges. This work, with its extremes of saturation and local contrast should never have been entered for the competition. There have been some images in other competitions – even World Press Photo – that I’ve thought perhaps have gone a little beyond the acceptable, but these are more extreme.
I’m not saying that they are bad pictures, but that the treatment is unsuitable for the purpose. If pushed I would say that two of the three shown clearly don’t work very well, and although the default conversions from RAW do still need a little tweaking, clearly there is a better photograph that could have been made from them than the pictures the photographer sent in. With the third, the bottom image on the page with a yellow chair and a blue concrete beam, this graphic treatment is rather more successful. It is also rather harder to tell from the default processed RAW file exactly what a more photographic approach could have achieved from this file.
These pictures were taken up yesterday on The Online Photographer, where there is quite a lot of discussion both of yesterday’s post and a follow-up today.
As Mike Johnston says there “If you like the wretched excess of the overhyped, overcooked style, go for itit’s your hobby; you own it. They’re your pictures.” And there are certainly plenty of people on Flickr who do seem to like it. It makes me cringe, and it certainly isn’t appropriate for photojournalism.
http://www.fotoco.dk/POY_2009/index.html
This link allows you to see the full series as submitted and by clicking auto gives a flash transformation into Adobe RAW Default and Auto settings.
Given the publicity I fully expect a set of Photoshop Actions to give the effect to be on sale imminently.
Not directly relevant to the argument but he did use a Nikon D700 :-)
What a very interesting debate, how far is too far ? Are we in the realms of the old UK pornography laws where the definitions were just as wooly and subjective ? The genie of photoshop isn’t going back in the bottle but then it was always possible to use the darkroom to enhance/change the negative. Do we accept Bill Brandt’s work as photojournalism ? Do his prints ” preserve the image’s original expression” ? Or do they project his vision of what he saw in his minds eye as reality ? Is gross manipulation acceptable in black and white but not in colour because of our perception that colour is/should be more faithful to reality ? ( no discussion of our individual realities allowed ? )
On Szarkowski I have recently had published a short article on Photobooks of 2008 which I entitled “Mirrors and Windows” in which I argue that today the AND is perceived by many to have equal if not a greater weight as the other two words. Certainly 1978 was a long time ago and I’m sure his view would have “matured” by now.
Hi Chris,
I tried that link on Wednesday and couldn’t get the page to display any pictures at all – perhaps I didn’t wait long enough for it all to load – but that was why I didn’t include it. Still can’t – and I’ve now left it loading for 20 minutes. Perhaps it needs a different browser or a different flash version.
Brandt’s work is an interesting comparison, but when it was published first in the illustrated magazines it was dark and moody and I think rather reflected the kind of weather and light he liked to shoot in, even if sometimes it had actually been taken under rather brighter conditions.
In later years of course he reprinted much as very high contrast, but by that time his work was more aimed at the fine art market than photojournalism, with which his relationship was always uneasy – perhaps culminating in his Gorbals assignment where when the editors saw the pictures they immediately dispatched Bert Hardy to do the job. Of course Brandt was certainly not the only surrealist photographer who sometimes worked for the photo magazines, but I think he kept more of a distance than most.
Brandt’s work for the magazines was largely I think features rather than news, and a greater freedom of interpretation is perhaps appropriate. Illustrations for features are of course often not photographic.
But I think in this case what disturbs me is that the photographer’s manipulation fails to do the subject justice, turning it into a kind of fairy story that is more about graphic toying than the event. From the pictures I’ve seen it fails to come over to me as a strongly felt subjective impression, but even if it did I’d still feel that it failed to properly represent the subject.
I’m sure Szarkowski’s views were more mature and nuanced than I suggest even at the time, but it made for an interesting show.