Picture Notes

One in a series of articles about photography by ©Bill Koplitz

“I know what a good photograph is,” a college photojournalism instructor once told me. “It’s one I like.” He was an older guy with a round face and an easy, quirky, smile. He had spent most of his life making photographs for newspapers, teaching photography and looking at photographs, and at that time he only seemed to like the abstract and obscure ones.

The photographs he showed me were a series of abstract pieces of colored glass. He told me they were “great” and spoke of the student like he was going to be the next best thing. The photographs looked like technical photographs from the medical field, a dissection. I kept waiting for the blood.

This exchange woke up my desire to understand and define what is a good photograph. Over the years I’ve asked many people to tell me what they like and why they think it’s good. I also spent time looking at how images were used commercially and tried to decide which ones were really good, and which ones were not.

There are several ways to define a good photograph, each asking a different question about the image and it’s purpose. What is considered a good news photograph isn’t normally going to have much of a commercial life, and when I originally wrote this article newspapers would never publish a commercial “type” of photograph in their editorial sections - even if it was news, I’m not so sure about that now. Todays world of the television news has television stations using video news stories sent to them by manufacturers in their broadcasts, and many stations use this material as news features, not identifying the source of this material.

I went to the library and looked through 50 years of Life Magazines. I believe the photographs in Life have always set a standard for photography that is considered good by most magazine editors. By looking at the magazine I wanted to get a sense of “good” during the dawn and golden age of the magazine photograph. And I wanted to see if there were any obvious cycles at work in the market.

At an editorial photography workshop several years ago, the workshop leader told us how to take great photographs. He said, “Have great things happening in front of the camera.” When someone asked what a “great thing” was, he replied “capture a moment.” Someone else asked what a moment was. He told us we’d know it when we saw it or else there was no hope that we’d ever become a photographer.

Life Magazine is full of moments. It only takes a quick look through “The Best of Life” to find that Life was all about death. Funerals, death beds, death marches, dying children, tornadoes, war, and even weddings take on an air of death. I went forward in the library’s magazine collection to the end in 1974. The magazine had changed from the late 40’s when they ran photographic essays on Madison, WI, the best place to live in the USA, and The Country Doctor by W. Eugene Smith.

In the 70’s, when Life closed shop, the magazine had become what many magazines have become today, a kind of celebrity tracer. Not in the same sense of The National Inquirer or People, but in its own way it is about people in the news, politicians or celebrities, with an occasional article on the common person, Mr. Average Small Town American.

Was Life just giving the reader what they wanted? Does the market define the product, or the magazine in this case? Do buyer attitudes and interests change so rapidly that magazines fail when management looses touch with the tastes of its readers? Did television coverage of the Viet Nam war kill Life by showing a series of immediate images of death on television? At the time the magazine was a monthly with long production and they couldn’t bring the same kinds of immediate images to Americans as the nightly news. The magazine, as a product, had to be redefined. It needed to consider electronic video imaging and the instant gratification that video delivers.

Photography is now being redefined by digital imaging, digital video and the internet. Images that were made by service people of war get out and show prisoner conditions or an unexpected video tape shows up at the television station or a clip is posted on Youtube.com. We are being bombarded by images, everywhere we look, images are now cheap. Anyone can buy a technically excellent image on the internet for $1 in thousands of categories.

With so many thousand of images that we see each month, what is now a good, or even a real, photograph? How does a person know? I don’t think that it’s possible for anyone to really know.

I asked a commercial photographer how he defined a good photograph. He smiled and said, “it’s one the client will pay for.”

“It doesn’t matter if you like it?” I asked. “Or what it looks like?”

“Not really. I don’t like much of what I do because of short production times or small budgets. But I have to deliver something. A week after the photography session, I’m rarely satisfied with the results.”

His portfolio consisted of 24 hand tinted monochrome transparencies of people showing different emotions. When I asked him about the photographs, he told me a long story about the people and their relationship to each other and his relationship to them. Was I able to connect with the images any better after hearing the stories? Did he bring them to life? If so, is a successful photograph one that comes with a story? To me the successful photograph tells a story, even if it’s a “hard sell” commercial image. When does good photography become more than a question of what happens in front the camera, but a question of what happens behind it. Is it possible that what happens after the photograph has been made defines that as a good photograph. Like a marketing or public relations campaign.

Can someone look at the photograph and connect with it?

If an advertisement works and it increases sales and it includes a prominent photograph, is that a good photograph? Or just one that works in a particular context? Does commercial success define good photography, or does commercial success have more to do with defining balance sheets? It’s sort of asking if the public defines good photography by their reaction to the photographs, by how well it sells them, or if it reaches them emotionally. Is good photography the will of the people, art directors and buyers, or photographers?

Who are the “great” photographers today? Are they the most financially successful? The most popular with the media outlets? Are they hunched down behind the camera, smiling at what is being recorded on film, still unknown to the public? Are they on the internet? Are they spending 10 hours a day in PhotoShop or writing HTML.

I still don’t know what good photography is but now I have new ways of looking at the image. To understand the image. I now ask: Who benefits from this image, and how do they benefit? Does the image promote and continue some kind of sales myth, or can anyone connect with the image? Is it immediately understandable what the photographer was trying to say? Or was the photograph for the subject’s own use where the question of if was good becomes irrelevant?

I think back to the university professor and the photographs of abstract glass pieces. The glass was about possibilities and discovery, about seeing through something that was transparent and puzzling and finding unexpected beauty and order. The photographs could have been about his life at the university, seeing students arrive on that first day of class, as chunks of colored glass.