Practice, Don't Preach

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Door & Ivy  © Kel Harvey


There are as many versions of 'proper practice' in photography as there are photographers and photographs. The notion of proper practice, as I've mentioned before, is rooted in the notion that photography is mere 'craft'. When I taught my night-class, this is what my pupils expected of me - that I would teach them the 'proper' way to take photographs. This is as much anathema to me now as it was then.

These days, there are still magazines touting formulas for pictorial success, although they at least acknowledge a much broader spectrum of subject matter and technique, reflecting the true nature of what is in reality an endlessly varied artform.

I just went back to a piece in the excellent BLACK+WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY - a monthly journal devoted to, well, black & white photography, natch. In the Comment section, Tim Clinch addresses the vexed old question of image cropping. This one is as old as photography itself and raises so many hackles on both sides of the argument: to crop or not to crop. Purists would argue for only cropping in camera, using lens length and positioning to arrange the final composition at the point of exposure. The other camp argues the opposite: crop all you like, in camera or in post, it matters not.

There are similar dichotomous spats over exposure, sharpness, framing, abstraction versus depiction, etc., etc.  But going back over the now fairly long and established history of photographers and their art, it's clear that whatever approach fits the artist's intent is the one to take. From the spiritual and utterly pre-conceived final outcomes of Ansel Adams, who would 'see' the final composition and tonal range of his finished work before the exposure of the plates in camera took place, to the practitioners of 'poor' processing and darkroom practice, like Ralph Gibson; to say, contemporary Croatian photographer, Olga Karlovac's febrile cityscapes, almost Lynchian in their nervous, paranoid abstraction of city life: all are valid and all are radically different approaches to both image-making and technique. Tim Clinch is a cropper and argues for it. He's neither wrong nor right. There's room for all approaches in this very broad church.

BLACK+WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY 
Olga Karlovac 

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