Okay, so it's gonna be hell of a talk today, so we better prepare
I find myself speaking about art better this way.
Warning: there will be sh** loads of pictures today, luckily for you not all of them are mine. Meanwhile,
special thanks to sponsors of today's episode: your art ignorance, since you clicked on this video,
and mine. So don't take it too seriously.
Welcome again at Aperture Value, this one is going to be about photography style which I've been pursuing so far.
The one that most of you hashtag has #minimal #minimalism #minimalistic or #minimalist.
By looking at my works it becomes clear why minimal comes first to mind.
According to others, crap is what would come second.
Anyway, I really love this aesthetics and I see more and more people admire it and
try to create something with the same kind of look,
and as a result I get questions from time to time like how to create it
and do I need to sit in bushes for hours staring at some building waiting for the right light.
Let's look into the history behind minimalist photography, but before we get to the photography
part, why not start with just minimalist first. So minimalism is the whole artistic movement, not just
photography and painting, but also music, sculpture, literature and sh**. It appeared as early as beginning of
1900s, but truly evolved during the post-WWII times and although it took place all
over the world, the U.S. was the epicenter of it all. The reason for it was partly because
after the war many artists from Europe fled to the United States and by doing so became of a
great interest to CIA. The dominant at that time abstract and modernist art was used to express
various ideas, including political ones, therefore shifting towards minimalism was considered to be
safe for artists, especially the new ones, who were afraid to be misinterpreted. Let's be honest, not
only government, but regular people as well find it hard to understand what the f*** is that.
"Just recently the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art dealt with a little bit of a controversy after
one 17 year old prankster put some glasses on the hardwood floor and made it appear as though it was
a work of art. As a result individuals started taking photos of it and attempted to interpret
what it meant..."
Instead of being subjective self-expression, minimalism is more about shapes, forms, repetitions, surfaces, and patterns.
Works of Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Agnes Martin are great examples of minimalism in visual arts.
While I was doing a research for this episode, I was surprised to find out that one of my recent shots somewhat resembled one of Agnes Martin's
work. By the way, it was shot on my Canon G1X, you can check the link above for the review. So you see
that the move from painting to photography medium is very slight in terms of looks,
now what are the rules? There are four elements that you can manipulate in your composition:
object, texture, color and shape. The less you use, the better it is. The primary concept of minimalism
is to avoid nature, unless it is the background for your subject. That is, if you picture a shape or an
object, it must be taken out of natural surrounding and if your subject is part of nature, you need to
rule out all the human or animal presence out of it. Anything potentially distracting needs to be
taken out of the equation. Minimalism lived through its peak until 1990s starting from paintings in
50s and 60s ending with landscape installations and architecture in the end. Since at that time
film photography was basically the only way to take pictures, photography world wasn't much into
minimalist movement. Obviously, film photography required very special skills, preparations, set
installations and props to prepare this kind of art. Simply saying, it was easier to paint
it, okay! But everything changed with the digital photography taking over: with more and more tools
like Photoshop we can finally get the proper minimalistic look. So to answer the question - yes,
I do photoshop my photographs, sometimes heavily, and here's why you shouldn't be afraid to do it.
Unlike street photography, where people really take any photoshop seriously,
thinking that any altering means shaming your ass, in minimalism the raw photograph you take -
it's just a canvas for you to work on your vision. Everything needs to be cut down and
edited out to leave just mentioned before object, texture, color or shape. It should look extremely
simplistic, but trust me, it's not simple to create that effect. Actually, the most prominent minimalist
artist Donald Judd hated to be referred to this genre because minimalism implies
simplistic, which in turn means easy or primitive. He didn't like it because it's just not true
and I completely agree, man... When I'm editing my photos, I take my time with any perceivable detail
that I find distracting, that means all the cracks, dirt, people, signs, trees, clouds, birds, cars, stones,
trash, wire, spots and broken lines have to go away. Less is more. The job is to create a simple, but
perfect balance to execute vision. I know that most of my pictures can't just happen in real life,
but that is the point: rule out all the mess for you to see the subject better, to see what
I see. Minimalism is heavily inspired by eastern culture dominantly by Japanese. Zen philosophy
is all about being simple and leaving everything rest but the very core, essential. This philosophy
still holds up today, so many of the Japanese interiors, houses, gardens and everything else will
certainly look minimalistic to us, ignorant Western idiots... Gaijin! By the time, minimalism moved to be
something broader than an art niche, it became a style of executing other kinds of photography.
The most obvious ones are abstract and conceptual, but you can use it for architecture, for instance.
Landscapes and aerial also can give some awesome results when done in minimalism.
Street photography is kind of harder for implementation, but still possible.
You can play with long exposure as well, recently it becomes very mainstream in black and white,
even portraiture is no exception.
So now hopefully you have some idea about minimalism, with me together,
and if you have some other info or comments - let me know down below 'cuz I
ain't no professor, and it is always great to get something from a person who actually
knows something from the book, not from the internet...
...like me.