This is an image I took at Shelving Rock Falls, on the east side of Lake George in New York.
Not long before taking it, I’d seen a show of some of the Hudson River School painters. Their work was on my mind this whole trip (we were camping in the Adirondacks). We took a pleasant summer hike to the falls and then went on to the lake itself and swam for a while. There were folks in bathing suits scrambling all over the rocks of the falls and as well as the top (which sort of explained why there are a few accidents every year there—lots of chances to slip and get badly hurt).
I’d done a lot of the classic playing around with long and slow exposures of moving water using ND filters and a polarizer for the long exposures earlier. Here I suddenly got an inspiration that the bathers were in a glorious sunlit patch while I was shooting from across the falls out of deep shade and I wanted that to come out painterly, sort of Hudson River-ish. I shot a number of frames slightly out of focus to get what I was thinking about.
When I got around to processing, I was like wow, I nailed it. At the time, I was posting some of my work to a few social media sites focused on photography, including Flickr. I’d already taken a strong scholarly interest in how sites built for rapid-fire engagement using likes, loves, views, etc. to push images up or down in the main areas of the site were changing the aesthetics of the people who were trying to get attention for their images. More and more, the images started to cohere to an increasingly specific aesthetic, to the point that some of them were virtually identical cliches. It’s the same process people have noted in critiquing how Instagram directs people doing landscape shots (or selfies in landscape) to the same places, the same angles, the same background weather conditions (or they just cut-and-paste the sky they want).
With this image, I was honestly thinking “hey maybe people will see what I did and like that instead”. I was moderately active on several sites, in the classic mode of seeking reciprocal engagement. But for this shot, what I got was a lot of people going out of their way to say “That’s terrible, it’s out of focus, you can do better”.
It kind of shook me up. Was it wrong to try to make the image I had in mind? To have a specific intention and try to pull it off technically? I took the image off one site and just kind of forgot about it for a while. But I eventually decided to print a little book of images using one of the many services that did that (I only started trying to really print my work in a serious way myself much later) and I gave a few family members and friends copies. A good art historian friend responded with a very thoughtful critical analysis of the profoundly amateurish images, and when she came to this one, she said, “You look like you were trying to do something somewhat like the Hudson Valley painters did”. I hadn’t said a thing! I wasn’t sure it was a good image, mind you, but I was sure again that I hadn’t been crazy in thinking about it the way I was.
If I were doing it today, I’d probably try something slightly different to get to the same ends, possibly overlayering two images or more in Photoshop—that’s a style of photographic composition that I’m still fairly unpracticed with, but I see a lot of work I really admire that is built on that approach.
This, I think, is where the conventional critique of online content and the platforms that host it is substantially valid. The steering currents on most platforms pull everyone to the same monotonizing, conforming destinations. To have your own ideas becomes harder and harder, especially when attention stops being just about psychological gratification and instead starts to be about actually making ends meet.