Season 3 Episode 8: Klausbernd Vollmar on Ugliness

Thank you so much for your kind and thought-provoking words, Rebecca. I’m also very grateful for the photo documentation from the past. My library of photo documentation and artwork by photographers are steadily growing and thanks to you, now including three books by and about Cindy Sherman. There’s so much learn from others.
We just had another controversial discussion about why the images failed to present ugliness. I refuse to deliberately throw aboard anything I know about composition and editing in order to let my technical work appear “ugly”! 🙂 But this is not primarily about the ugliness in my photos; it IS difficult to capture the essence of ugliness. And besides; when we write or talk about ugliness we don’t change our art of WRITING or SPEAKING.
Our discussion at the breakfast table was nevertheless very interesting (for the psychologist 😉 ) because of my NO! reaction.
After having given it some thought, I agree;
There is a very odd conflicting feeling caused by a beautiful image of an ugly object – almost akin to a guilty pleasure. Bottom line: be pleased if there’s any emotion from your audience at all; the stronger, the better. Be very concerned if there’s no reaction at all because it means the image does not work – beautiful or otherwise.
For something to trigger emotion in us, it must touch our minds at an irrational level: This is probably the core of beauty or ugliness. It is impossible to describe why the proportions of one object might be beautiful, but another similar one grotesque; you cannot describe a set of rules to quantify when an unexpected asymmetry or design flourish results in the one imbalance that creates profoundness – or when it simply looks out of place. If anything, both beauty and ugliness are the opposite ends of the same thing: an exception to the ordinary. One triggers positive emotions, the other, negative. What qualifies as an exception is of course different to different people, and a product of their own experiences, biases and resultant preferences.

What would you go for, dear Rebecca, if I challenge you to go outside with your camera or phone – what would you capture to illustrate “the ugly”? I wonder if any of the photo challenges out there ever had the topic “The Ugly”?

Love and hugs to you
Dina-Hanne

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Oh dear, Rebecca and Klausbernd, I had just written such a long comment and suddenly the page did something like reloading and it was gone, so frustrating! I’ll try again. When this happen to KB (and you know he can write long) he says, I know what it was about, I’ll write it a second time and it’ll probably be better this time. I’m not expecting this outcome, so bear with me.

“The use their language to transport a message. There is no communication without a message. But it matters if the senders understand what they communicate. Authors only communicate with other authors only in courses dealing with writing or on a higher level in the literary critique. But these are mostly not the authors who are active in the same genre.”

Last night we watched a most interesting literary discussion; the four participants were highly educated in literature and languages and displayed four different views and ways of interpreting the novels. To watch was amusing, entertaining and educating.
Yes, I agree, to be able to comprehend and appreciate an art form to its fullest, one has to be educated in it. However, many people that are not (and I’m not saying their opinion shouldn’t count), are not able to realize them all, and then only judge by what the literal subject of the image is: sunsets, flowers, etc, can separate the layers and have a better of what’s really going on. Any painting, photo, literature, dance dwell in the abstract: its composition depends on the principles of geometry, rhythm, hierarchy, scale, repetition and many others. So, a painting, a photo, a novel and so on is never only about the obvious subject matter. In a novel, the writer has to choose words not only for their meaning but also to convey a sense of rhythm when a person reads it while telling even a simple story. But, a person who knows about literature can find these resources the writer used and thus find the text much more enjoyable. The same with a painting: a Caravaggio may show, say, a child angel, but that’s not the only theme of the painting. It might be the eroticism of the figure, the play of light and dark areas, the saturation of certain colours.

“You need a message and in a way every message is political. The message is the only reason for iconographic and verbal communication.”

In Photography there are many things happening at the same time too, but to fully judge a photo, one has to be aware of them. And, the more educated one is in these kinds of things, the more one can understand the creative process of the photographer and appreciate more his sense of design and thought process. One might not LIKE a picture, but at the same time, one can learn to APPRECIATE it. And even more so if one also knows about art and photography history, because usually there are precedents and allusions, and these are also used to communicate with the people who know them.

“In the end, there is the question what is left to communicate.”
Phew, we are communicating a lot right now 😉
“But, of course, you have to make sure that the receiver notices your message. That’s dependant on the media you use and whom you want to address.” Of course, and many gadgets allows more circulation of what we want to message, it depends on how you use them. Bisweilen, it drains me, I must admit.
What puzzles me with no end, is what happens to a photograph put in a museum of modern art, or in a very reputable or cool gallery, or in well made and well-visited podcast/blog; all photographs become instantly better and much more valued.

Time to go out in nature, the sun is out! 🙂
Big hugs 🤗🤗
Hanne

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