He spots a recurring theme in my work though, of reverting to the binds of the aesthetics. This is something that I also agree with. When I look at the set now I see that some of them are nice images but they do not add anything to the story I am trying to tell.
Signs and symbols come up several times and how to link images together better. I have been thinking about this for a week or so now, before I received his feedback. There was a time that I would have considered a picture without perfect light, without perfect composition, without perfect colour a right off. However images work deeper than that. Especially when telling a story. I have a habit of always looking for an aesthetically good point of view for an image and I am working on breaking through this at the moment.
I think that I do put a lot of store on getting something technically perfect. Now I don't think that there is anything wrong with that. However as Flickr bears testament to, there are many technically perfect images that lack soul. They are all about object and environmental aesthetic but communicate nothing.
On this subject I came across this quote from Jose Navarro:
I would say that the act of being-in-the-world is primarily – but by no means exclusively – a visual experience. It follows that photography has the uncanny ability to articulate how places affect our emotions and how we feel about them at a deep, almost unconscious level. The basis of psychogeographies in photography lies in skipping the cognitive process that leads to taking a photograph. What I mean is that we can bypass our minds and take photographs straight from the experience of perception, of the perception of the place we are in. In other words, do not think about the photograph you are about to take, just capture what your body is perceiving that precise moment – with all your senses, although the sense of sight will prevail, obviously. Lee Friedlander springs to mind as, knowingly or unknowingly, one of the first psychogeographers – see his photographs in the book The Desert, published by Thames & Hudson. Raymond Depardon’s Errance photographs are also a good example of psychogeographies."
I think this is along the lines of what my tutor means. Because a camera is a technical piece of equipment, it is a trap that any photographer can fall into, to get caught up in the shutter speed and f stop. What the above quote says to me is that what makes great photographs is being able to combine this technical ability with the ability to transfer what we feel about a place or person, any subject, into an image.
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