My rules
Volleyball referee feet
The image above shows the feet of two referees adjudicating side by side matches of a middle school volleyball tournament. Their job is to enforce the rules of the game; to blow the whistle if lines are crossed. Sometimes they miss a fault or let one slide.
This photograph has been manipulated using Photoshop but only within the limits of my rules.
There are no rules that fine art photographers must obey but many of us define our work in part by the restrictions we place upon ourselves. My self imposed restrictions are these:
- Move yourself but nothing you see – change the framing but not the framed
- Use the computer only as a daylight darkroom – do nothing that could not be done in camera or in a real darkroom
These are old fashioned rules but I am only truly comfortable when I keep them. The myth that “photography is truth” is crucial to the images I make. This is not because I wish to share a post-modern joke with the viewer but because I intend the claim that the images are true; their truth being vouched for because “photographs” are pictures of real things that the viewer could have witnessed for themselves.
These are arbitrary rules – I allow digital manipulation to alter color saturation and exposure but I will not remove a wrinkle or pebble, I will turn red into gray but not into blue. The viewer could not actually have witnessed the view presented in the image without colored glass, a telescope and one or more other camera and darkroom tricks. But the form has been preserved, the form would be acknowledged as true.
I break my rules sometimes. The first picture that I ever sold was manipulated to the point of being unrecognizable as a photograph; I doubt the buyer would have known it was not a painting if the dealer had not told them. But if I do that too often I fear that I will undermine the myth of photographic truth that I rely on for the rest of the work. I cross the line occasionally but retreat quickly back.
