What Makes a Good Photograph?

I’ve been thinking about what makes a good picture. An entirely foolish notion that usually leaves the person attempting to answer it looking, foolish. No wonder the big brained opinion-avers punted on this long ago.

It is however important. It is important in the same way that the judging of words is important. I’m fairly sure nobody is going to defend the random keyboard poking of a three year old with the “personal vision” standby, yet that excuse is used everyday with photography.

At the most basic, the first time a person picks up a camera they usually have the desire to share what they photograph with someone else. It might be a kid’s birthday cake, or a shuttle launch, The thought is always, “Look at this.”

Which is the same approach that I’ve tried to stick with over the years, although maybe a bit more complicated like, “Hey look at this, I know you’ve seen it before, but isn’t it interesting from this angle, at right this moment?”

Whether your target audience is the readers of a certain blog, museum goers or grandma, you’ve failed if they don’t want to look at your picture.

So if nobody wants to look at your work, it is probably bad.

If only a few people, besides grandma want to look at your work, it might be good, or even really good.

If a million people want to look at your work it is good, unless of course it’s a picture of Paris Hilton, which means the quality of your work is irrelevant. The subject has surpassed your particular vision. Now, if forty years from now people still want to look at your images of Paris Hilton, you might be good again.

This rule holds true regardless of the subject. If in forty years people still want to look at your pictures of Jimmy Carter, OK that’s not really a fair example, in forty years if people still want to look at the pictures you made on the streets of New York City, you’re a good photographer. You made some good pictures.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated. Say you made a picture in New York City forty years ago. This image was used on the cover of LIFE, also that week it was hung in MOMA. Assuming the image is readily available today, if nobody wants to look at it now chances are you made a useful image, not a good one.

This fact is multiplied by the forty year rule that says, an image improves with age and needs about forty years to become a classic.

There’s nothing wrong with making a useful image of course. Maybe that’s what really separates amateurs from professionals. That would explain why amateurs made most of the visual leaps in photography that were eventually adapted by professionals (something to talk about later).

The answer is simple. I good image is one people want to look at, whether you have an audience of twenty or a million. Whoops we’ve just fallen into the  “eye of the beholder” rabbit-hole, which is just the flip side of the “personal vision” argument I dismissed earlier.

There is a real answer to this question and its important.

Photography is a language. It has rules of grammar, spelling, and structure. It can be “spoken” at different levels of sophistication depending on the audience and the needs of the situation.

I’ve said in the past, that one of the reasons that photo editors are so important is because they are bilingual. They speak both photographer and wordsmith. The interpret and explain what photographs mean to people that don’t speak (much of) our language.

Now, the reason that photographs work as a form of communication, is that everybody (that can see) understands a bit of what they are saying.

They might not be able to verbalize what the image is saying (or how), but they get the message.

Remember Plato’s cave? Think of photographs as the shadows on the wall. Instead of just shadows of things, the photographs are also shadows of ideas.

What the photographer is trying to do regardless of the subject matter, is to capture the most perfect representation of that idea. It could be “hunger”, “love”, “pain”, anything really, but it’s an idea being captured.

We are all embedded with these ideas to one degree or another depending on our cultural background and how much we were hugged as kids.

If you want to be a better photographer you should study art history to understand how these visual ideals have been engrained on the human mind over the years.

Form, structure, contrast, color, these tools are just part of the alphabet that the photographer uses to write their words, or sentences, maybe paragraphs. I’m not quite sure what the rate of conversion (a thousand to one?).

The better job that a photographer does when writing the photograph, the more people want to look at it.

Subject matter is also one of the tools of the photographers craft (this is where it hits a little to close to home).

What that means is, as a photographer working in the photojournalist tradition you go out to photograph a Marilyn Monroe photo op (yes, we’ve just traveled back in time). Your first concern is making the “useful” image that pays the bills. Your second concern is making an image that you like. Your third concern is the ideal. You’re trying to make a picture that describes the term “sex-symbol”.

In this example, you’ve been given a good tool to help you achieve your goal. It would be harder to reach the platonic ideal if you were photographing Paris Hilton that night instead. Just like it would be harder to succeed if the light was poor.

The same would hold true if you had complete access to the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign instead of the JFK presidential campaign. Chances are the images of Carter would not capture the ideal vision of what a presidential race “is”.

This also means that photographers (unlike writers) have very little control over the ‘tools” they are given at any one time. Which makes it a less precise or predictable language than words, an inconsistency that is often used to describe it (or the people producing it) as a somewhat lesser form of communication.

That’s how we fall into the undefinable eye of the beholder/personal vision trap.

To wrap it up, there is such a thing as a good and bad in photography (and in any art for that matter).

A good photograph is one that people want to look at. People want to look at a good photograph, because it speaks to them about an idea in a language that they understand on a deeper level apart from words.

Comments

[hand-it-over]

Wow, that got deep for a second, then you saved it at the end. Nice recovery... Thanks.

[hand-it-over]

Oh yeah, now I feel real good about why the sky is blue, too.