Art vs. Technical skill

Following on from my previous post about pictorialism: I've reached a place where I can admit that I've been unhappy with my photographs for about as long as I've been taking them.

Phew! That wasn't so hard to admit.

There are a variety of reasons for this but I think it comes down to two basic elements which are reflected in every photograph:

• Art, and
• Technical Skill

I perceive that my work tends towards the technically "interesting" but artistically "bland".
I am an IT person and I guess I've gravitated towards that career because I'm naturally the kind of person who thinks in squares and rectangles. When I conceptualise something it's all about Right-Angles - action and reaction, cause and effect. In other words, I am a logical thinker, rather than an abstract or artistic thinker.

This naturally affects my photography - my images will tend to be somewhat technical concoctions, rather than meaningful works of artistic expression. This is a natural consequence of the way my brain works.

The problem arises from the fact that I enjoy photography from others that reflects the more creative, artistic side of photography, and wish I could emulate it.

But dreaming up a photo and pre-visualising it are extremely challenging. Once I have the idea, it's a different matter - because then it's just a technical exercise in realising it. Give me a theme and tell me to take a captivating photograph of it and I'll be lost. But describe the image to me and I'll do it.


Answers I've sought include:

• Giving up altogether on photography
• Taking beautiful landscapes that everyone praises me for (I'm not so artistically illiterate as to not recognise a beautiful landscape in front of me!)
• Trying to take artistic geometric abstract-type images
• Trying to reproduce favourite photographs from others

In the end, these are all doomed to failure, because in pretty much all cases, I still don't like the images that result. However, at the grand old age of very nearly 40, I've decided on a new course of action. Which can be distilled to a very simple principle. Namely:

The heck with it. I'll just take pictures of whatever I want to!

To Hell with whether it's arty or not. If I think it's gonna make a good picture, I'll shoot it. And I don't give a rat's whether anyone likes, or even gets the results.

For example: This is one of my favourite images that I made recently:

(It's OK, you don't have to like it!)

I've had this new approach for a couple of months now and I am pleased to report that everyone thinks I've gone insane. But I've been enjoying photography a lot more for it, and I'm actually starting to like some of the images that result from it.

I'm still going to practice the whole "concept and pre-visualisation" thing, but I've decided that this particular skill isn't strictly necessary in order to call yourself a photographer (as opposed to someone who merely takes photographs)