Chuck Close: Thoughts on photography and personal voice
Posted by Dean Bradshaw | Filed under visual style in photography
The thing that interests me about photography and why it’s different from all other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece. You cannot make an accidental masterpiece if you’re a painter or a sculptor. It’s just not going to happen. Something will be wrong.
This is simultaneously photography’s great advantage and its Achilles’ heel: it is the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody can be a marginally capable photographer, but it takes a lot of work to learn to become even a competent painter. Now, having said that, I think while photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is probably the hardest one in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s the hardest medium in which to separate yourself from all those other people who are doing reasonably good stuff and to find a personal voice, your own vision, and to make something that is truly, memorably yours and not someone else’s. A recognized signature style of photography is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve.
It always amazes me that just when I think that there’s nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to a new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and moving and as formally interesting as any other medium. It’s like pushing something heavy uphill. Photography’s not an easy medium. It is, finally, perhaps the hardest of them all.
Tags: Art, creativity, Style
Finding Style: the dilemma of photography
Posted by Dean Bradshaw | Filed under Thoughts and Theory
I came across this fascinating insight by Chuck Close whilst watching a documentary on the history of the photographic medium. It has led me down and interesting path of thought, one that I have been pondering in the back of my mind for a while, which has now been forced to the forefront of my imagination – the notion of photographic Style.
Here’s the dilemma and the strength of photography.
Its the easiest medium in which to be competent, but it’s the hardest medium in which to have personal vision which is readily identifiable. There is no physicality to a photograph…there is nothing you can point to and say “this is the work of that artists hands”.
So then…how do you make a photograph that somebody immediately knows as the work of a particular artist?
Well that is a very difficult and complicated thing to come up with – and when someone really ends up nailing down a particular kind of vision to such an extent that they own that vision – you know they’ve really done something.
- Chuck Close (American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist.)
I’m going to consider photographic style over a few more posts, as it can take one very far down the rabbit hole…
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Tags: Art, creativity, Philosophy, Style
