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Re: Making nature natural


  • From: P3D Eric Goldstein <egoldste@xxxxxx>
  • Subject: Re: Making nature natural
  • Date: Mon, 07 Oct 1996 19:23:45 -0500

P3D Marvin Jones wrote (heavily edited):


> it STILL won't be "natural," because it
> will represent a choice on the cameraman's part to photograph this specific
> event/object from this specific angle, giving it an "unnatural" significance
> over everything else that was going on just outside the camera's view.
 (snip)
> every time the image on the screen changes, there has been a
> gap in time and often in location which is being eliminated. And the
> juxtaposition of shots tells a story that is being imposed on the footage by the
> editor.

While I acknowledge your very basic primer on the effects of camera POV,
editorial choices, sequence, and the accompanying distortions of
reality, it is safe to assume that we've all lived with these
limitations for as long as we've been viewing and creating photographic
images, and have come to understand them quite well. We understand that
when a camera is pointing in one direction, it is not recording images
from another direction. And that when 20 hours of footage is edited into
an hour long program, that 19 hours of real time are lost. These points
are a given to any photographic discussion. Here are a few more: films
record a more compressed version of reality than we see both in color
rendition and in brightness, lenses each have their own angle of view
and optical distortions which differ from how we view events through our
eyes, etc. We do not gain any insight by offering these facts up for
each discussion, because they are a given in every photographic
situation. Not just "nature" photography, but any photography. We
understand and accepted them as part of the very basic grammer and
fabric of the media (whether still, film, video, etc).

How do your comments uniquely relate to the discussion of overtly
manipulative and theatrical practices in nature photography, and what
might properly be judged to be a "nature" photograph or film? If your
answer is (and it seems to be) that "All photography is a manipulation,"
and thus that any and all manipulations are within the realm of the
acceptable, then once again I would contend that this response is so
extreme and excessive as to render any further discussion along these
lines meaningless. By your logic, we can have no viable documentary or
photojournalistic images at all, so why bother to maintain accepted
editorial practices?


Eric G.


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