Fine Art Photography Revisited
I'm an avid fan of Brooks Jensen. If you don't know who he is, you should. Brooks is the editor of LensWork Publishing. He has been putting out a Podcast for quite some time now, and I subscribe to this via iTunes (free download) and listen on my iPod when time permits. The contents of his podcasts are quite appealing to me. He speaks about the creative process, which is also the core of most of his published content in LensWork magazine as well. As I was working on getting caught up on past issues of the podcast, I came across one titled What Makes a Good Fine Art Photograph? This peaked my interest since I had just recently written my own article called What Makes a Photograph Great?
This is a difficult subject. My left brain constantly wants to define things while my right brain wants to be intuitive. Defining something as complex as fine art is something that needs to be done, but it's simply an individual and subjective topic.
Anyway... back to the tidbit I gained from this podcast... Brooks Jensen created a definition of fine art that I think I can live with. In this podcast, he says "A good fine art photograph is one that makes the viewer so aware of the emotional content that the viewer is unaware of the print."
I can't believe how simple and accurate this statement really is. My own thoughts all along have been that everything about the photograph should be supportive of that emotional content. The composition, lighting, and all other technical elements of the image are just supporting characters in this show where emotional content is the leading lady. The supporting elements should be strong. There is no doubt about that. But, they don't define the emotional content of the image.
Instead of going into more depth, I think I'm just going to smoke this idea for a while and see how well it embeds in my mind...