My friend Howard was a good copywriter in his day. He wrote for the leading ad agencies and won awards for his work. One evening, over a drink, he told me a story about a time he was on a set where they were shooting a commercial for agricultural products. The creative team used actors from Atlanta and real farm people as extras. As Howard looked on, the actors seemed hopelessly fake and the farm people very real, coming across as exactly what they were. Howard wondered if the smart thing might be to turn the whole presentation over to the farmers. Who would know better about the products or pitch them convincingly?
And then the cameras began to roll.
The actors turned into farmers, and the farmers turned into wooden caricatures of themselves. Howard said the transformation was startling. Watching the farmers, the actors quickly got the essence of how the farmers presented themselves. It was the actor’s gift to relay that impression to the camera. But the camera became the enemy of the farmers—its cold eye threatened them. They suppressed their personas. It is not easy to be who you really are when strangers might judge you.
I am always disappointed in my photographs. They never seem to say what I want or cause anyone to feel what I did when viewing the scene. Perhaps really great photographers can manage to capture all that, but even they don’t drink in reality unfiltered. I once watched a show about how Ansel Adams manipulated his prints in the darkroom to get his desired effects. The variety of images processed from the same plate was striking, and Adams worked well before our time of Photoshop. Adams bent ‘reality’ to conform to his vision and then presented the vision to us. We mistook it for fact. We should have taken it for art.
The goal in making art is revealed in the actor’s craft or in Adams’s careful work in the dark room. It is the process of compression and interpretation, eliminating the unnecessary, using the main lines of the thing to transform reality and create a coherent statement from an incoherent visual world. Reality is far too complex to put down unfiltered on a piece of paper or a canvas. The artist must make choices and focus on the essence of the scene before him. When well done, this triage does not diminish the result; it reveals a defined truth—a truth formerly concealed in complexity. To illustrate my point, I offer here a pen and ink drawing and a photograph. The drawing was not made from the photo; the photo was taken well after the drawing was done (this morning to be precise). Though the drawing might have been done in many different—the photo does not make my statement, the drawing does.
Frank Wilson’s Pasture– photo
“Frank Wilson’s Pasture” 9×24 Pen & Ink Private collection
Copyright James Tucker