That’s not a rhetorical question. Yeah, yeah – I know – I’m asking it to avoid having to work. This week has been “No Good” © in that regard. Nevertheless, it’s a question I’ve been toying with.
Photography like any art form, lends itself to developing styles. Writers have prose vs. poetry. Photographers have macro vs. portraiture vs. still-life vs. . . . But these broad generalizations are a simple and ultimately coarse way of defining style. They describe only what you do but say nothing about what your work represents.
Ok. So I want to transcend these broad categorizations and ask myself to define artistic – specifically photographic – style.
Style is how you see the world.
It’s more than subject matter. Or even technique. It’s the feel you instill in your work. And finding “your feel” is hard.
Can I define feel? Well . . . maybe. Take a look at Nitsa’s The streets are alive and compare it with Walter Molotov’s A Street Photography Blog. Same content but very different ways of viewing it. Start flipping through their work and you start to notice themes. Not simply in the subjects they chose, but in how they’re portrayed.
Feel can be expressed in so many ways. Do you see the world in IR? In black & white?
Is your world one in while colors lose their punch – where people and objects have less impact? Or one in which even the dullest of days is saturated, almost dripping with color?
Questions like this are just the start. . .
[To be continued]