Abstract photography is not a big seller. I love it, both as a photographer and a consumer, but most people who would buy fine art photography (already a very small audience) are not going to buy an abstract photograph. Not that that concerns me in an economic sense; I'm just trying to figure out the psychology of it.
It has been said quite eloquently that the difference between abstract photography and "traditional" photography is this: traditional photography has a subject, while abstract photography is about pure form. The lack of popularity of abstracts got me to thinking, though, about the
real difference between an abstract photograph and a traditional landscape or still life photograph. All photographs are abstract, but maybe it's the
degree of abstraction that turns people off?
While camping by myself last August in the Eastern Sierra, I of course did a lot of photography, but you can't photograph 14 hours a day for a week; so I also did a lot of writing, thinking, and reading. Artificial intelligence/adaptive systems, fuzzy logic, and recursive mathematics are the three things I always seem to go back to of late. The fuzzy logic principals of "A is not A" and "the whole in the part", which I won't attempt to explain here but you can read all about it if you want, kept resonating through my mind. Anyway, I realized that "A is not A" is true because two things that are "opposites" are only opposites and a certain level of abstraction--the level of abstraction at which we usually view things based on a number of factors. But if you move up the hierarchy of abstraction, as you get less abstract and closer to the pure form, opposites converge and really become the same thing. I then spent an entire day working out elaborate proofs of this theory in my head. The example subject matter I used for these proofs ranged from photography to religion. Since religion is a very controversial subject, especially today, and since this is a photography web site, I'll just share my photography example here.
The hierarchy of abstraction starts with what is, moves through how we perceive it, continues through how we copy it photographically, and ends in how we perceive the copy.
Level 0: Truth, reality, whatever you want to call it. To man, this is not just unknown, but truly unknowable. The sooner you stop arguing about this and just simply accept the fact that the human mind is incapable of knowing absolute reality, the sooner you can move on to a higher level of understanding.
Level 1: Perceived reality. This is the generally agreed upon definition of reality as observed by the majority of the human race (everyone minus the "crazies", conspiracy theorists, etc.).
Level 2: Your reality. This is your own spin on perceived reality, based on genetics, upbringing, mythological/religious/philosophical beliefs, etc. Also includes anything physical which warps your sense of reality (color blindness, no depth perception, poor vision, etc.).
Level 3: Temporal/environmental factors. Full sun? Partly cloudy? Sunrise? Night time? 110 degrees outside? 12 below zero? High winds? Above 18,000 feet elevation? These can affect how you perceive things, directly or indirectly.
Level 4: The viewfinder. See, we're already four levels abstracted from truth, and this is the first mention of photography! Your level three reality takes on an entirely different character when viewed through the viewfinder of your camera. Instantly the view becomes cropped. Depending on the focal length of the lens you are using, the view can become distorted. With a digital viewfinder, you view a pixilated representation that depending on your camera may already be modified in some ways (it may even already be in black and white, like it is with my primary camera). And if you are using an SLR, you're just fooling yourself if you think you are seeing an exact representation of reality through your viewfinder.
Level 5: The captured image. No matter what kind of camera/viewfinder you have, this is the moment where you take a 3-, 4-, 5-, 6- or more dimensional experience and translate it down to a 2-D interpretation. This 2-D interpretation is the image as captured in a JPG, TIFF, or RAW file and saved in your camera. For the sake of simplicity, from this point on we'll talk strictly about digital photography. But the quality of your camera, lens, imaging chip, etc. all play important roles in how the resultant file differs from what you saw in the viewfinder.
Level 6: The displayed image I. The captured image is displayed on your computer in an imaging program like Photoshop. How much modification you do to the image is a matter of personal preference; the digital file you possess is already so far removed from truth that you can't make it much more abstract. Saying that a file unmodified in Photoshop is more pure than one that has had some modifications done to it is, well, quite a stretch when you consider how abstracted both images already are from truth.
Level 7: The displayed image II. This could be a small JPG file on a web page, or a mounted print. The JPG is a re-sampled version of the sixth level abstraction; the printed image also varies greatly from the "original" file, whether printed in a tradition darkroom or on an inkjet printer, whether on RC paper or platinum/palladium.
Level 8: The viewed image. You look at the finished product. Your perception of the image is tainted by some things we discussed previously: perceived reality, your reality, and temporal/environmental factors, etc.
Level 9+: You send an unmounted print to a magazine, and the editor scans it and reproduces it and it gets printed on red paper and someone views it under a black light wearing sunglasses...
This could go on and on, but the point is this: by the time you display a "finished photograph", whether on Internet or a mounted print or some other method of display, arguing about how abstract the image is or is not is about as practical as "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." When you think about this, what's the difference between a precisionist image like Ansel Adams' "Moonrise", one of the most famous and admired photographs ever taken, vs. a so-called 'abstract' work like "Rock, 1973" by Wynn Bullock? Is the Adams image less abstract than the Bullock image? Only in terms of someone being able to clearly identify the subject matter. But technically both images are at the same level of abstraction. Don't confuse our human ability to recognize and identify with certain shapes to mean that some images are less abstract than others.
Looking at photographs—or any artwork, for that matter—with this hierarchy of abstraction in mind can really put artwork in context. Whether you recognize the subject matter of the artwork or not has little or nothing to do with how abstract the artwork actually is. By its very definition, all artwork is an abstraction of truth.
[ photographs above: Pomona, 2004 to 2005 ]
