I was listening tonight to a conversation between Jim Svejda and the amazing Hilary Hahn on Classical KUSC, my favorite radio station here in Southern California. For those who don’t now, Jim Svejda is the most knowledgeable person on classical music probably on the planet and hosts several absolutely fascinating programs on KUSC. And Hilary Hahn, at the age of 28, is one of the most phenomenal violinist on the current scene and certainly destined to be one of the great violinists of all time if not already so.
Their conversation delved into two dimensions of classical music performance – technique and interpretation. It went something along these lines – composers don’t write compositions that are difficult to perform to give the performer a chance to display their technique. Composers write compositions, difficult or easy, because they have something to say. And performers haven’t mastered the composition when they’ve mastered the challenges of technique. It is only when they also master the interpretation that they create music.
Hilary Hahn used a phrase that caught my attention – ‘Interpretive decisions.’ It was delivered in the context of discussing a very abstract, technical, even mathematical violin concerto by Arnold Schoenberg, a piece that’s a challenge to listen to not to mention the challenge it is to perform. Hahn said that there were ‘interpretive decisions’ that added meaning to or subtracted it from the piece. That makes a lot of sense. A poorly interpreted piece, no matter how great, is boring whereas a richly interpreted piece, while being very simple, can be captivating.
What does all this have to do with a photographer’s personal style. Well, in a word, everything.
Technique – the first couple of postings on personal style (Musings on Personal Style #1 and Musings on Personal Style #2) alluded to technique. They discussed the tools on the photographer’s tool chest and the mastery of these tools. These tools were referred to as the photographer’s ‘creative vocabulary,’ because it is the mastery of these tools that shape and define what the photographer can say.
This posting moves into the area of interpretation. There’s a line from a play, the title and author of which I don’t recall, but it stuck with me because it was a freeing ah-ha moment in my early stages of becoming a photographer artist. “Documentation is craft; interpretation is art.” The more I get into the art of photography or, actually, art in general, the more I realize that art is interpretation. I asked some friends of mine the following question and I ask it of you also, “What is more important in a work of art, the subject or the artist?”
‘Interpretive decisions’ is a perfect phrase to describe what we do when we’re working on a photograph in our digital darkrooms. Our workflow is not a rote process. Sure, we may have things we always do at the start (the opening game) and things we always do at the end (the end game), but in between the decisions we make shape the final work.
Let’s explore this just a bit further. My opening game consists of converting the RAW image in Lightroom. And while this is not a rote process in general I’ll focus on tonal values – open the shadows if they need it and recover highlights if necessary. I may do some luminosity adjustments to different color channels as well as some saturation and hue adjustments. But that’s about it. But the decisions on how to adjust tonal values, color luminosity and the rest are all interpretive decisions that are a reflection of the way I see the world and no one else.
In Photoshop there are very well defined opening moves. I always start with the Photokit capture sharpener. Don’t freak out; that’s a sharpener designed to be used at the start of the process to compensate for distortions introduced by the pixel structure of the sensor and the high pass filter through which the light must pass to reach the sensor pixels. Another first move I generally do is to burn the four corners a bit and I like to use Unsharp Mask to add some pop to the image. Again, don’t freak out; the way I use it introduces no sharpening whatsoever.
The end game involves flattening the image, resizing it and applying the Photokit output sharpener.
In between comes a host of interpretive decisions. Many of the adjustments will be local in nature – burning, dodging, increasing contrast here, adjusting the color there and so on. The interpretive decision made at each step result from looking at the image, seeing something that is distracting from what I want it to say and fixing it. I dare say if you and I were working on the same image file and your opening and end games were identical to mine we would still end up with totally different photograph because we would make different interpretive decisions along the way. Each of our photographs would be works that express our individuality.
The two components come together then – technique in the form of our individual creative vocabularies and interpretation as shaped by the highly personal interpretive decisions we make. I can’t help thinking of a photograph in the administrative offices at Zion National Park. It’s of the bridge that crosses the Virgin River. The time of day is sunset and of course the entire length of the bridge is lined with photographers. There was a relatively snide comment under the photo something about “a unique creative experience.” The ranger didn’t get it. Fine art is more about the artist and less about the subject. The works from the artists on that bridge would tell more about them then they would of the gentle river and cottonwood trees in the foreground or the magnificent Watchman in the background.
Virgin River and the Watchman
So thanks Hilary, thanks for this great term – interpretive decisions. And thanks for the exquisite music you create.
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