[EV +/-] Exposure Compensation of photography and photographers

I am reading now a wonderful book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in visual communication, including photographers. The book is titled “How to think like a great graphic designer“. The title is quite misleading, because this is not a how-to-book by any measure, it is a series of interviews with great designers of our time and conducted by the influential Debbie Millman.

It is fascinating to learn what these masters of design think about visual communication, to learn on their careers and design in general. It should come to no surprise that there are strong similarities between the work and life of designers and photographers in that both try to communicate using visual language, both are influenced by the audience and both like recognition. Some of the statements in the interviews relate very well to photography and I like to cite a couple as food-for-thought:

I’m very much changing with the opinion of the audience. Very much like a wet-finger politician. I put my finger up in the air to see which way the wind blows. I think this should be very detrimental to my work if I were a fine artist. But in the field of graphic design, where you are always designing something for an audience, it works very well to be this way. I think the expectation is that fine artists basically work for themselves, and the audience gets what ever they can from it. I am sure there are fine artists out there who keep the audience in mind when they work, but it is not the accepted trajectory of the profession. Conversely it is very clear in design that what we do needs to be seen and understood by an audience – Stefan Sagmeister [very interesting and original new book from Stefan here]

So which kind of photographer are you? Do you like to be understood and appreciated by a large audience? If you work in the commercial or editorial world you must be understood, and perhaps it is best for you to see which way the wind blows. It can be a hard fit if you like to express your own voice as an artist. I wonder if this is why commercial photography has homogenized the look of the images, so that it becomes difficult to recognize the photographer. Most appear to follow the wind these days. The wind blowed by photo editors and art directors that tend to be disappointingly conservative.

Before we get started, one relevant thing to state is that communication design is for others and to others as opposed for yourself to yourself. This is an important thing for would-be designers to recognize. There is a great misconception in the era of graphic design that it is a medium of self-expression.-Peter Saville

So, do you think your photography is for others and to others or it is for yourself and to yourself? Does it matter to you what others think of your work? Is photography for you a medium of self-expression?

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