Messages, Elements, Decisions

Does anyone else write fifteen blogs a day? Well, I don’t post fifteen but I write at least that many—mostly while sitting a Denny’s. I come across so much about photography and I want to share it all.

I am reading David duChemin’s Photographically Speaking for the humpteenth time. Have you ever read a book where you wanted to share practically every paragraph with your friends? Well that’s the way I feel about Photography Speaking. I see it as a guide from being a picture taker to being a photographer.

I always read when I go out to eat by myself. I have purchased three copies of Photographically Speaking. One I gave to a friend when I realized that I had two copies. Then I lost the copy I had so I replaced it. I promptly lost that copy also. Alcy was in Barnes and Noble and noticed that they had only one copy so she bought it for me to shut up my wailing and gnashing of teeth. Every time I replace a copy I have to go through the entire book and redo the underlining—which truthfully is the majority of the book.

As I have mentioned before I grew up reading the likes of Minor White and Ralph Hattersley Jr so I’m a little warped to begin with. I don’t find what David writes to be profound or erudite. It is simply stated in understandable ways. He says the same thing I got from White and Hattersley but in a more down to earth, absorbable manner. I personally think that David is today’s premier writer on photography. Yes there are other writers that I enjoy but David covers it all. What he teaches is how to move from being a picture taker to a photographer and I’m still working on that.

I keep trying to explain to people my philosophy that “the photograph is not the subject.” Which means that if you photograph a rose, the photograph is not the rose but what your photograph says about how you feel about the rose. The photograph is a new entity, not a rose, something totally separate from the rose. It is an object de arte and needs to be seen as a photograph and not as what the subject matter of the photograph might be. I think understanding this is crucial if we wish to grow as photographers.

David breaks photographs down into three elements: Message, Elements and Decisions. The message is the subject of the photograph (not the subject matter but the subject), Elements is what you include or exclude from the photograph to tell the viewer what you want to say about the subject matter and Decisions is the choices you make in assembling your story, the placement of your words, the composition of the image. White goes about it somewhat more esoterically as Mirrors, Messages and Manifestations. It is much easier to understand what David is saying.

He also states something that I feel is extremely important and is simply another way of saying the same as “the photograph is not the subject.” David says, “Perhaps the steepest learning curve in photography is learning to see as the camera sees. The moment photographers understand that the camera sees profoundly differently than we do is a crucial moment. It’s the moment an individual with a camera becomes a photographer…Before we learn to see like the camera… we are just people with cameras.”

He also reminds the reader that there are no roses or people in a photograph. There is simply lines and forms that represent a rose or a person. Seeing a photograph as what the lines and shapes represent, the subject matter, distracts us as photographers. We are illusionists but unfortunately we fall for our own illusions much too easily. “The camera will create an illusion the moment we release the shutter, if we want a hand in creating that illusion, we need to understand it… That illusion is created by every element in the photograph and every decision made. Elements and Decisions: that’s what we have. It’s what you do with what you have, as it is with every art.”

He also makes another comment that I greatly enjoy about quotations. I love quotations. I love using quotations from poetry, the Bible, writers, thinkers, photographers, Shakespeare. I only mention Shakespeare because David uses a quote from King Lear to illustrate his point. As he says, in the case of Shakespeare, the entire play is important but a quote from the play distills a point from the play in a very powerful way. We frequently use quotations to advance our points. Quotations often distill aspects of life. Photographs do the same thing; they quote life out of context. They distill a facet, an aspect of life in a very powerful way. They show us things that we might otherwise overlook. They do this within a frame, an excerpt. It is the photographer’s job to use Elements and Decisions to give that excerpt Message.

Otherwise, you just took a picture.