Only thing missing is reality
Jan. 1st, 2020 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqThere was some discussion in the Photography sub recently about the quality of the posts going up in some of the other subs - like r/EarthPorn, for example. It started with one user calling out another for simply editing somebody else's picture, adding lightning and a few other effects, and then posting it to the high-volume Earth Porn sub to try and reap free karma. From there, the conversation veered into a discussion on whether that sub should even refer to itself as a "photography" sub, since the pictures posted there are almost all processed past the point where they should rightfully be called photographs.
This is not to say that nobody does processing on their photographs - I do, but that is just a fact of life when you are shooting in raw format. Usually the editing is done to try and juggle the colours and contrast to bring it closer to how it looked in person, or at worst to bring out some features that got blown/washed out by the camera.
The problem in the Earth Porn sub - and many of the other places where people post photos these days - is that the processing does not stop there. If you were to scroll through some of those image sites, you would find picture after picture where the saturation, sharpness, and dynamic ranged have been cranked up to 11. They have been processed in post to the point where the photographs are more like a cartoonishly vivid representation of the original scene. One could visit the locale of the picture in person, but would never see it looking remotely like it's depicted in the picture (without taking a lot of medication first).
It's not just photography either. Modern society seems to embrace the overwrought. A lot of popular music is processed to the point where it would be impossible to reproduce in a live performance. Between auto-tune, compression, computerized resequencing and the like there is very little semblance of the original artists left in the final musical productions.
I am not saying that neither of these things are art, I just don't believe that they are truly performance arts any more. They are computer-rendered approximations of performance art in the same way that a piece of meat run through a grinder and reassembled with meat glue into sirloin strip could be considered a steak. I am not questioning the validity of the latter, just its authenticity in trying to pass itself off as a steak.
That is how I feel about a lot of modern landscape photography and music - they are a valid art form, but they've shed the veneer of authenticity.
This is not to say that nobody does processing on their photographs - I do, but that is just a fact of life when you are shooting in raw format. Usually the editing is done to try and juggle the colours and contrast to bring it closer to how it looked in person, or at worst to bring out some features that got blown/washed out by the camera.
The problem in the Earth Porn sub - and many of the other places where people post photos these days - is that the processing does not stop there. If you were to scroll through some of those image sites, you would find picture after picture where the saturation, sharpness, and dynamic ranged have been cranked up to 11. They have been processed in post to the point where the photographs are more like a cartoonishly vivid representation of the original scene. One could visit the locale of the picture in person, but would never see it looking remotely like it's depicted in the picture (without taking a lot of medication first).
It's not just photography either. Modern society seems to embrace the overwrought. A lot of popular music is processed to the point where it would be impossible to reproduce in a live performance. Between auto-tune, compression, computerized resequencing and the like there is very little semblance of the original artists left in the final musical productions.
I am not saying that neither of these things are art, I just don't believe that they are truly performance arts any more. They are computer-rendered approximations of performance art in the same way that a piece of meat run through a grinder and reassembled with meat glue into sirloin strip could be considered a steak. I am not questioning the validity of the latter, just its authenticity in trying to pass itself off as a steak.
That is how I feel about a lot of modern landscape photography and music - they are a valid art form, but they've shed the veneer of authenticity.
