Migrant Mother is Out of Focus
Last week, Andy Adams shared an essay by Peter Hoffman about the power of photography in the age of AI. Along with an explanation of the delightful photo-specific term “punctum,” Hoffman distilled an idea that I’ve been circling for a few years but have failed to succinctly define — that too many photographers have “the idea of craft battered into them so hard that it is impossible to see value in a photograph that doesn’t look like a technical achievement.”
Amen. That’s it for me in a nutshell, the central tenet in my current thinking about photography. I have never in my life been less interested in the technical quality of a photograph.1 After a lifetime of studying technique and working to refine, refine, refine, I’m tired of it. Unfulfilled. Stop the ride I want to get off.
This is made more clear to me with every advance in post-processing capability, with every amazing new face-tuning filter, with every sharp new lens and every image-generating AI. The closer an image is to technically perfect, the less interested I become.
I didn’t decide this, I should mention. This was not a choice. I just noticed I was feeling it. I want less refinement, less polish. I stopped using hair lights in the studio. I retouch less and less. I lean into imperfection. I cherish a crooked smile. I’m all about the wabi-sabi.
To be clear, technical quality can still wow me in a photograph, can add to the beauty and power of an image, of course. But for my money, it simply can’t be all there is. I can’t stomach only a technical achievement. It can’t be a veneer that was added in post. If the technique serves the subject, the idea, the meaning, I’m on board. But if technique is all that’s on offer, I am left wholly unsatisfied.
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams
There’s technical quality, and then there’s quality in the way Robert Pirsig writes about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Quality is not something you believe in, quality is something you experience.”
Now that I’ve figured that out, what do I do next?
Bill Sawalich • Photographer + Writer 