Choices.

I was reading Rachel’s excellent post from several days back, and it provoked many thoughts, so I decided to make a post of my own about it. I won’t exhaustively summarize the whole post here, but I encourage you to follow the link and read it for yourselves. Briefly, her post was mainly about the “rules” of photography and how strict adherence to them can stifle creativity. I’d like to take that a step further and suggest it might also stifle critique.

There’s a difference, I think, between “rules” and technique – technique, as Rachel noted, is comprised of knowledge about exposure times, aperture, depth of field, etc. - the basic operations of a camera and, by extension, the production of an image. Rules, however, seem to be more concerned with judgments of good or bad – “good” exposure, the “right” depth of field, the “best” composition, and are more subjective.

It seems obvious how rules can stifle creativity – you don’t dare color outside the lines when overly concerned with The Rules. But that doesn’t worry me so much – my creativity is mine to whatever degree I possess it (and of course it ebbs and flows, and heck, disappears entirely at times). I don’t think I bother so much about rules that they seriously get in my way. But what personally freaks me out is what it seems to do for the viewers of any image.

The way I see it, producing an image and subsequently displaying it for others is at its core a simple offering: Here, look at this, look at what I have to show you. The ideal viewer is receptive – she is willing to contemplate and question what she sees before her. She is also one who takes the image at face value and makes any judgment, if there is judgment, within the bounds of what has been offered. This isn’t to say that the ideal viewer has to like the image, not at all, but she should have a response to it that meets the image on its own terms.

Ok, what do I mean by that? Take the zoneplate image I selected to accompany this post: the cat is a very small portion of the image. An ideal critique would start with the assumption that, for instance, the proportioning of the image (in this case, the smallness of the cat relative to the entire composition) was deliberately chosen. A suggestion that the shot would be “better” if it featured the cat in a close-up, while the suggestion may be helpful so long as you are in the The Rules club, nevertheless does not come from a place that starts with the basic fact of photographer choice – it instead asks that the picture be something else entirely – to be, essentially, someone else’s choice. Ideally, a response that accounts for photographer choice would ask why that particular composition was chosen and not another, and go on from there.

(I won’t even get started on all the other rules this shot breaks – you can imagine the overall reception it received. Oddly, though, it does seem to follow the Rule of Thirds. Purely accidental, Officer, I swear.)

Over the few years I’ve received comments at a photography site I frequent, I’ve observed a depressing reliance on the part of the commenters on The Rules. Depressing, not because such comments tend in fact to be negative about my image, but in that it makes me wonder how a reliance on these contrivances might end up depriving the viewer/commenter from the full experience of what they see in front of them. What frequently happens is that the reception of the image (as I’ve defined the ideal, above) either does not exist, or is boiled down to a declaration of how much or how little the image achieves Perfection (as defined by The Rules). Pass or Fail...Next.

Seriously, if we all followed The Rules for every image, wouldn’t things get homogenous, and a bit boring? An image that follows The Rules is not bad, let me be clear; it’s just that there should be room in any photographer’s mind for more possibilities than that. Making a plea for openness to photographer choice is not the same thing as saying “screw technique”. Why not sit a spell and get to know the image in front of you instead of hoping for something completely different? When the viewer judges rather than experiences, he shuts himself off in a way that ultimately limits his own choices.

And by way of full disclosure, I have not always been the Ideal Viewer. But it's something I strive for, always.