Integrity: A Mutable Idea?

I have been considering Integrity recently in the artistic sense and my thinking has evolved. And yes my thinking is probably quite slow in this regard. 

Definitions

When I think about the word integrity comes the simple answer related to honesty or truth. Further thought goes to the root of the word implying integral or integrated. And this brings to mind ideas more like consistency and the parts making a sensible whole. This of course circles back to the idea of honesty and truth when applied personally to oneself. In any case I started out with the simpler early definition. My understanding as it related to my photography evolved towards the later meaning. 

I fully expect that readers may think this is obvious but for me it was not.  I do not claim to plow fresh ground, merely to say how I have covered this ground that is no doubt well travelled.

Starting Points

When I started on a more serious pursuit of photography and before it had crystallized, much of the time I had this rigid or absolute sense of integrity with respect to the subject. I would photograph what I saw. Nothing would be staged or manipulated; only photograph what I saw before me. Now at that time it did not occur to me that composing the image or moving the camera or changing a lens was in any sense manipulating the image. Of course photography would not be possible if one eliminated these (and other) manipulations. Still these are distinguished in the sense they change the observer and not the observed. 

And so I continued in this vein until I started to get a little more serious. Then as late as last year I was out in a local woodland shortly after I had taken up my recent woodland project. It was a cold wet morning and I stumbled upon, in the middle of a small trail, some bright red mushrooms. I was shooting color and it was after most of the autumn color had left the trees, indeed most of the trees were naked of leaves. This left me busy constructing images from green moss and gray tree trunks and dead brown leaves. It did not feel promising but I persevered as I was also rehearsing and perfecting technique on my large format camera. 

One could imagine it was quite exciting to find new color like red, I certainly did. So I set up the 4x5 camera pointed it on the ground and began to compose and meter the scene for Velvia 50 and Ektar 100. Looking around the area there were a few yellow leaves recently flown from a nearby tree. I thought that color is part of the scene but it is not in frame. So I picked up a couple of leaves and dropped them into the frame. I finished the composition, carefully focused the camera, metered it with my spot meter then loaded the film holder pulled the dark slide and released the shutter. The whole time I was haunted with this sense of guilt or shame. I had manipulated the image. I had broken with my integrity. 

I sent the film off to be developed and it comes back. Technically excellent, I liked the exposure, the focus was good. The colors nicely saturated as Velvia will do. It looked how I remembered it. Even the wet reflections caught the blue tone of the cold November sky. Is it a great photo? No I don’t think so. But it is good and one of my better works at the time, especially as color goes. Still I see the leaves and to me they look out of place because I suppose I placed them there. They travelled perhaps 12 inches to get there but I knew how they got there and that was what mattered. 

Red Mushrooms

The important thing however the seal had been broken. With this break began my introspection on my artistic integrity. 

Impacts

As I continued to look at and criticize my other work I often saw how a photo was ruined by some small twig or stem or reed of grass that would be in the field of view. Often these distractions were so close to the camera that unless the lens was stopped down one could hardly notice the diffuse image on the ground glass. This frustrated many promising images once printed as some fuzzy portion of the image was more apparent in the print. So I resolved to be more careful and look for these elements outside of the ground glass image as they were so hard to see there. Then I would try and move the camera until I could avoid these little distractions. Inevitably the composition would change in some regrettable way or perhaps they could not be avoided at all. 

This in turn led to the next 'erosion' of my precious integrity. I reasoned that these distracting elements were not what I was seeing when I looked at the image. I was seeing past these but the camera was incapable of that. And at that point I began to prune scenes of dead twigs, stray grass or other elements. Now if it was living I would try and bend and trap it out of the way without breaking it if possible. No sense in destroying the landscape in the process

. 

Charlie Cramer and Ansel Adams

I found then I had more successful images. And this lead me to a more mature understanding of my image making. Something that everyone else probably already knows but something I struggled with for an inordinate amount of time. This was summarized for me in a talk Charlie Cramer gave at an OnLandscape symposium a couple of years ago. Now I don’t think I had heard of Charlie Cramer before this and it was just a random watch on my part. He had some charming stories about Ansel Adams who he knew and that was probably my entry point to the video. At some point he rather eloquently made the probably obvious point I was coming to more personally.

To Paraphrase: 

The sensor (or film) is completely objective, but the viewer or photographer is subjective. The trick of photography is to take that objective image and use it to recreate the subjective. To recreate the experience.

Now to be fair he was speaking about post-production work. But it is also true to the composition (ante-production) phase. I (the person) am subjective, I am seeing an image that I want to  pre-visualize as a print. (Pre-visualization is of course Ansel Adams signature idea that he has the final print in mind when he takes the photo.) I would contend this is all part of the ante-production work. The selection of the subject. The choice of location of the camera, the lens focal length, the composition and framing. Then on to exposure, choice of filters, aperture and shutter speed. 

So I, as the photographer, am subjective, I am seeing an image in my mind’s eye and how it may look in a print. I have a camera which is entirely objective; in that it will capture exactly to the limits of the physics involved what is there on the film plane in that moment. I then have to know how to take that objective result and reconstruct the subjective image in my mind from the objective image I have captured. To quote Charlie Cramer...

 “ my brain is not objective when I am out there and I am attending to the things I find enjoyable...” “When making the print I have to say No! this is what is really important. “

Ansel Adams spent a lot of time discussing what he did in the camera (ante-production) and in the darkroom (post-production) to complete his pre-visualization. 

For instance in the above-referenced video Charlie Cramer give an example of Adams’ Half Dome photo one with a yellow filter and the other with a red filter. The red filter made the sky almost black and that was the one he chose to print. This was ante-production work. 

Ansel Adams Half Dome

In another example the print of Denali his pre-visualization insisted the mountain should be more luminous and this in turn demanded an almost black sky. So he set about burning the sky in such an exquisite way it is impossible to detect that is how it was done. In neither example was the sky black. Indeed it seems in both cases the sky was blue. But the subject in his pre-visualization stood out in his mind in such a way that only a black sky would do. 

What the Denali may have looked like before burning.
(Ansel Adams)

After burning. (Ansel Adams)

From a very strict view of integrity he clearly violated this as the sky was likely not like the print implies. Yet it works because the pre-visualization was good and in itself had integrity.     

To paraphrase Charlie Cramer again he says as long as you pursue a photograph with Integrity, Conviction, and Craft you will do good work.