Nostalgia vs Excellence

nonsequitir

It's interesting to see the responses and feedback to old shots that were scanned in and shared online. Lot's of "Fantastic shots" or "Wow!" type responses.

My question is this. Can nostalgia transform an average shot into a truly great shot and following on from this if it were true, would this mean that photographic luminaries such as Cartier-Bresson were really just average photographers who are now great "in our time"?

Effects

I don't think it's nostalgia that makes a shot better. You also have to think of equipment and processes at the time as well as how photography was percieved and what was achieved with it at that time.

Covey

Cartier Bresson was even more "great" in his time!

nonsequitir

But if you bring the 'technology' into the equation then you could make the same claims today, no?

And isn't being "great in one's time" more to do with being the first at doing something, a pioneer if you will, rather than being great?

Chris Bonnington was the 1st to scale Everest and therefore considered great. But would he stand up against today's climbers and is greatness therefore just firstness?

Covey

nonsequitir wrote: »

Chris Bonnington was the 1st to scale Everest and therefore considered great.

What ???

Effects

nonsequitir wrote: »

Chris Bonnington was the 1st to scale Everest and therefore considered great. But would he stand up against today's climbers and is greatness therefore just firstness?

You're mixing him up with Ed Hillary. But again you have to consider that no one had done it before, it wasn't as easy as it is now and the risks were a lot greater.

Covey

Cartier Bresson wasn't the first to do what he did by a long way. There were many long before him, most notably Atget. However, he probably brought it more to the masses and as well as that was a fantastic photographer to boot.

Sometime stuff gets overrated because of nostalgia, but more often than not longevity is a indicator of quality.

Fenster

I was actually mulling this very question myself - why am I drawn to 'off' colours, soft focus and outright bad composition from cheap cameras and faux-cheap digital processing?

I don't think that it is nostalgia. I think a major portion of it is (ignore the 2k of digital equipment, okay?) the desire to show a less polished and more intimate view of the world. Strip away the perspective correction, colour balancing, levels adjustments and sharpening to give a...what? A more primal image?

nonsequitir

Effects wrote: »

You're mixing him up with Ed Hillary. But again you have to consider that no one had done it before, it wasn't as easy as it is now and the risks were a lot greater.

LOL, I did mean the former, but I did mean to say Anapurna (or however you spell it!)

sunny2004

nonsequitir wrote: »

would this mean that photographic luminaries such as Cartier-Bresson were really just average photographers who are now great "in our time"?

LMAO .... ok, I cant type "!

sineadw

I see what you're getting at OP. I have a wall beside my bed that I stick a load of postcard sized images on, just for visual feeding and inspiration. There are a few there from the national archive, taken during the war of independence and the civil war, as well as a few from the 1800's (and even one I bought in a flea market in Paris of a WW1 Stalag prisoner with a note to his family on the back to say he's still alive). Some are great photos. Some are average, but are given an extra element for me as they're records of their time. They're two very different things in my eye though.

elven

I was thinking something similar when those links to the dublin of the 60s images were doing the rounds earlier. It's so cool for us, because we get to see the ordinary stuff from back then, so it elevates those pictures to a level above the same image taken today, replacing the buildings and cars with their new ones. If you were to send a link to a bunch of pictures of exactly the same composition that were taken last week, they'd be considered snapshots, and boring. I think this is where there's a separation - you can have photos that are great regardless of the subject, but then you have images that are great simply because of the subject. Like the ones that Sinead mentioned above, it's the details that tell you something about someone's life that's interesting, not the way that the photo is taken. Or from a slightly different point of view, i was fascinated with a few of the pictures in the IMMA NY exhibition regardless of content, purely because i knew the methods and equipment that they had to master in order to create them at all.

As far as quality standing the test of time, I'm not so sure, as an exhaustive rule. There could just as easily have been amazing stuff that got overlooked in its own time and some of the things that have endured aren't necessarily that great, it's just that they were marketed properly at the time of creation and throughout the years since. But I do think great is great, no matter whether it was made last week or last century, the quality sets them apart from the rest.

I'm still trying to figure out what i think about being the first to do something, too. I'm not sure if all credit should be given to the very first person to think of doing something a certain way - someone else may well come along and use that method, and do something better. Is it good just because it's a first? The more i think about it, the more i'm not so sure about that. The mountain climbing thing maybe isn't the best metaphor - it's a task that has become easier over time with new technology (what about the guy that appeared at the summit ten minutes later, if there had been one? Does that change things?). When you're talking about a way of seeing - or presenting - the world in a different way, tools aren't going to make it easier. It's down to you.

eas

I've always enjoyed looking at old family photographs - even people who I don't know. I could do it for hours.

What I find most fascinating, is that back then, photographs had an emotional & sentimental element to them that to a large degree no longer exists.

In another aspect - the analogue aesthetic fad is in many areas of the arts, not only photography.

ThOnda

By aging, photographs increase their value as a time capsule - record of state of something or somebody in given time. That does not automatically mean that the artistic quality increases.
Talking about Bresson and other masters, their selection process and work with editors was so strict, so the pictures were and most likely will be considered as good photographs. The time only confirms that they made good selection.

Simplicius

to me this is simple ...........

The older photographs we see are from the best of those times, they survived. think like a pyramid .. we see the tip these days of all those millions of mundane photographs taken way back when ... so yes old photos we see are generally top class because they are the survivors.....

nonsequitir

Good point Simplicus. I guess we will face that issue of survival less and less because of the sheer volume of digital output these days. I have more photos on my hard drive than entire generations of my family before me.

Effects

eas wrote: »

In another aspect - the analogue aesthetic fad is in many areas of the arts, not only photography.

You can't really call the analogue aesthetic, as you put it, a fad. Are you saying people shouldn't paint with paint and brushes and instead use computers to create their art?