Almost identical editing

[Bobobird]

If you look at the recent winners of a photo competition that many of the images have an almost identical style in post processing.

I have seen almost exact same finishing on other places.

It can't be coincidence.

See 1 and 2 and there are more as you scroll through.

https://www.featureshoot.com/2020/01...c0223e68310bb1

[Manfred M]

I'm not sure if I would call it a surprise but rather the outcome given the makeup of the jury members. They virtually all come from the publishing world.

Right now the "fashionable" photography style goes by the name of "post-photographic" where flat lighting, muted tones and very little emotion shown by the subjects (not 100% the case here, but the vast majority are). Post-photographic is "in" with the fine art crowd, and that is primarily what we see here, so it is not surprising that the images have a similar look and feel to thm.

[Shadowman]

Bobo,

Thanks for sharing, many of the entries were reminiscent of the themes from coffee table books I enjoyed during my school years.

[Antonio Correia]

I don't like this "style"

[dje]

I don't like this "style"

I don't either! To each his own I guess.

[mugge]

The images were all 'very nice' and that is precisely why they are chosen in the first place - clinical but without fire.

[DanK]

I think that style is ugly. It reminds me of overexposed slides.

Trendy doesn't necessarily make for aesthetically pleasing, but there is no arguing over taste.

Douglas Stinson, a fine art photographer, wrote what I think is a nice condemnation of the trendiness in the fine art photography world. I assume he didn't mean it to be a condemnation because it is in an article in which he disparages what he calls the "camera club aesthetic." He wrote:

They [fine art photographers] live in an ecosystem of self-reinforcing gatekeepers: art school professors, critics, museum curators, gallery owners and collectors, each of which needs to increase their status (and therefore their influence) in the eyes of the others and their peers....As a result, all participants in this ecosystem become invested in socially constructing, maintaining, and defending a boundary between fine art and other forms of photography (Douglas G. Stinson, "Can Camera Clubs Learn from Fine Art Photography?", PSA Journal, July 2019, 20-25).

He says this leads to creativity. As an example, he includes an out of focus black and white image of a line of urinals, which he characterizes as "playing with repetition, light, and shadow".

It's a pity, because buried in this nonsense is an important point: in some club competitions, technical competence is often the primary focus, and some could use more emphasis on creativity. There could be more emphasis on creating one's own unique style.

[Manfred M]

I find the blanket "I don't like it" is always a bit dangerous when applied to a specific genre.

As a general statement, I have never been fond of Impressionism in painting and I find Van Gogh's sunflowers and Monet's irises downright revolting. On the other hand I really enjoy Georges Seurat's pointillism work quite fascinating (although Seurat's work is often viewed as post-impressionism).

Here are some more post-photographic images, some of which I like a lot more than the site that Bobo has pointed to:


https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...meras-pictures


I particularly like the work of Erik Johansson, who has one of his images show in the article. Petapixel has an excellent article on his work and how he accomplishes his results.

https://petapixel.com/2015/07/29/thi...ending-images/

[DanK]

Point taken. To be more precise, I should have written "I usually don't like it."

My main point wasn't about that style per se, but rather about the notion that doing whatever shows you are on the 'sophisticated' side of an artificial, constantly shifting, trendy border is what makes something "art." I don't care what the in-crowd says; a board with a bunch of construction debris glued to it--a real example from a well-regarded museum of modern art--is still just a pile of debris.

The irony, if you go back to Stinson's article, is that he defends the artificial boundary between fine-art photographers and amateurs as reflecting the greater creativity of the latter. Yet a lot of what that boundary is created of is fads--in this case, a fad about processing. There is nothing the slightest bit creative in following whatever the most recent fad is.

[LePetomane]

They certainly are interesting.

[Manfred M]

I think that style is ugly. It reminds me of overexposed slides.

Trendy doesn't necessarily make for aesthetically pleasing, but there is no arguing over taste.

Douglas Stinson, a fine art photographer, wrote what I think is a nice condemnation of the trendiness in the fine art photography world. I assume he didn't mean it to be a condemnation because it is in an article in which he disparages what he calls the "camera club aesthetic." He wrote:



He says this leads to creativity. As an example, he includes an out of focus black and white image of a line of urinals, which he characterizes as "playing with repetition, light, and shadow".

It's a pity, because buried in this nonsense is an important point: in some club competitions, technical competence is often the primary focus, and some could use more emphasis on creativity. There could be more emphasis on creating one's own unique style.

The problem with any photo competition is that the underlying direction of the group organizing the event can have built in biases. I've chatted with members of some of the national and international groups and have been told that often these non-amateur competitions end up being judged on the how well the image would sell or in the case of real estate photography, the likelihood of selling the property more quickly.

Let me point to two different websites showing competition results of some of these organizations:

1. Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC):

https://www.ppoc.ca/galleries/2019/2019_image_salon.php



2. Wedding Photojournalists Association (WPJA):

https://www.wpja.com/contests/2019-v...-photographers


A fine art approach (to differentiate from the other two commercial groups)


3. SPAO A+ (School of Photographic Arts Ottawa) Competition

https://spao.ca/a-plus


If I look at the winning images from both these groups, some of the PPOC entries would do well in club competitions while others would do poorly. In general the WPJA images would do poorly in club competitions. The judges for both of these groups are drawn from peers, so this is to be expected.

The SPAO competition is judges by nationally / internationally known curators and academics, so I would expect a similar reaction to these images as the ones in Bobo's link; the judges have a similar background. These images would generally fare poorly in club competitions.


When it comes to club photography, the image making and judging tend to be more "traditional". The quality of judging tends to be variable, depending on the pool that the club draws on. Often the juries are made up of club members, local retail or commercial photographers, etc. who may (or may not) be particularly qualified to judge. One often hears these judges say things like "I would have done it this way".

In Canada, clubs tend to follow CAPA (Canadian Association for Photographic Art) guidelines where images are judged on technical execution, how the material is organized in the frame and the emotional impact on the viewer, in roughly equal weighting for each category.

[Manfred M]

Point taken. To be more precise, I should have written "I usually don't like it."

My main point wasn't about that style per se, but rather about the notion that doing whatever shows you are on the 'sophisticated' side of an artificial, constantly shifting, trendy border is what makes something "art." I don't care what the in-crowd says; a board with a bunch of construction debris glued to it--a real example from a well-regarded museum of modern art--is still just a pile of debris.

The irony, if you go back to Stinson's article, is that he defends the artificial boundary between fine-art photographers and amateurs as reflecting the greater creativity of the latter. Yet a lot of what that boundary is created of is fads--in this case, a fad about processing. There is nothing the slightest bit creative in following whatever the most recent fad is.

Dan - agreed.

What I have always found fascinating is how fashions (or to use your word, "fads") come about, especially in fields like fashion or the arts. It comes right down to it the process seems to be driven by the opinion of "experts" that almost seems to migrate into "group think" in the field and before we know it, we have the "next big thing".

In other fields, medicine, the sciences, education, etc. we can develop tests using statistical methods and mathematical models to validate the relative correctness of things (at least to a degree, as data quality and assumptions can add unintended bias into the process), but when it comes to the "pure arts", art itself, fashion, philosophy, etc. the credentials of the "expert" is what really matters. The problem I have here is that the underlying assumption is that expert opinion is based on studying the works and opinions of experts from the past. Opinion built solely on previous opinion is a dangerous leap, I fear.