WHAT THE PHOTOGRAPHER DOES

Many of John Swarkowsky's observations about photography might be said about other art forms. He says that the central act of photography is the act of choosing and eliminating. The process is the same in all of the visual and plastic arts. The sculptor must decide what to keep and what to cut away in a block of marble. The painter must choose what will be included in the painting and what will not. What the photographer does when he looks through the viewfinder is to select what will be left out of the frame and what will be included. Even after the shutter closes on the photographer's decisions in the field or in the studio, the process of cropping, selecting out, continues in the darkroom or at the computer.

Swarkowsky doesn't like digital photography because it changes the reality of the image, yet he shoots in both black and white and in color. An artist working in any medium accepts some of the rules observed by most other artists and usually will adopt and observe stylistic patterns of his/her own. Perhaps Swarkowsky is not interested in knowing what Frank Sutcliffe would have done with his images of Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay if he had lived in the digital age, but I like to think about what he might have done with a good digital camera and Photoshop.

Mostly I like what Swarkowsky has to say, but I disagree with his attitude about digital images. Nothing I do with Photoshop changes the reality of the world more than making it black and white does. I like the things I can do with a pink camellia. I like it in pink and in black and white and in the other permutations I can create with digital editing software.

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John Swarkowsky, “THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S EYE: A WAY OF SEEING”

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge---the line that separates in from out---and on the shapes that are created by it.

Photographs stand in special relation to time, for they describe only the present.

Photography is the easiest thing in the world, if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indescriminately informative and pointless. But if one insists on a photograph that is both complex and vigorous, it is almost impossible.

With my current work, I try to make photographs that describe what I find interesting in my life now. I work to demonstrate to myself that my own sense of the world is true.”