Sunsets are ephemeral. Every one is different.
Sunset photographs on the other hand are "the most predictable, culturally
devalued and banal of all image making practices." (Pollen, A. n.d)
Beautiful like a chocolate box through misuse, or the type of subject matter
which amateurs strive to photograph well.
As early as
1908, Adolf Loos, a Viennese artist claimed that simplicity was an asset
and beautifying was a crime. John
Cooper Powys in Meaning of Culture (1930) suggested that “the less
cultured you are, the more you require from nature before you can be roused for
reciprocity” (Pollen, A) implying that amateurs took waterfalls and sunsets whilst
the more experienced were happy with grass blades on a stone.
"Photographs create the
beautiful and - over generations of picture-taking - use it up. Certain glories
of nature... have been all but abandoned to the indefatigable attentions of
amateur camera buffs. The image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny;
they now look, alas, too much like photographs." (Sontag as cited by
Pollen, n.d) meaning photographic mass-production saturates the market and
the awe is lost as well as declaring that sunset photographs are the products
of the aesthetically naive. Sontag further explains that "In
photography's earliest decades, photographs were expected to be idealized
images. This is still the aim of most amateur photographers, for whom a
beautiful photograph is a photograph of something beautiful, like a woman, a
sunset."
In 1966, photography
critic Julian Stallabrass's ‘Sixty Billion Sunsets’ studied the
photographic practice of amateurs and concluded that they were similar to the
object in question. His criticism "of mass photographic practice is
based on what he perceives to be its overwhelmingly conventionalised sameness (unlike
elite art practices, which are positively polarised as avant-garde, creative
and distinctive). In commodified camera culture, everyone takes photos of
similar things." (Pollen, A) He declared that all sunset photographs
were the same.
This idea continued throughout the 1960's where
cliched photographs were given a low cultural status, being thought of as
having a "limited aesthetic vision and an undeveloped practice."
(Pollen, A) Sontag explained that as photographers became more experienced in
art and photography, they grew out of taking cliched pictures. In the 1960’s
Sociologists Robert Castell and Dominique Schnapper studied a camera
club in which a member echoed these sentiments, suggesting that as
photographers gain experience they don’t do banal or pretty.
It seems that training
develops photographic vision. Bourdieu questioned whether taste is inherent in social
hierarchy and cultural experience and reinforces differences between social
groups with a single sunset image. Because everyone can access photography and
there is not a judgmental coding system, interpretation is subjective so people
will display their social dispositions based on how they take a photograph. He
found that “the proportion who declare that a sunset can make a beautiful photo
is greatest at the lowest educational level, declines at intermediate levels
[...] and grows strongly again among those who have completed several years of
higher education and who tend to consider that anything is suitable for
beautiful photography.” (Bourdieu as cited by Pollen)
Advice in magazines, online journals, blogs and
camera clubs still teach and confuse amateurs with technical and aesthetic advice
to aspire to “a good photo”, recognising that not all sunsets are the same.
In 1987, the One Day
for Life large-scale charity amateur photography competition, where a national
press campaign encouraged “everyone with a camera” to take a photograph of
everyday life in Britain competing for a place in a chronological 24-hour book.
There were 50,000 photographic rejects of the competition and an archive
containing thousands of sunset examples is stored at the University of Sussex. The
overall winning photograph was a sunset.
The context of the
book suggests that sunrise and sunset within the 24hour time frame. Capture
this successfully and you could be featured in the book. This opens the cliché to
all who enter the competition rather than just amateurs. Pollard argues that
the sunset becomes the signified and signifier of amateur photography. If the
book is about amateur photography, photographers may choose to shoot the
ordinary, everyday subjects, or even bad photographs. The cover design was a
sunset to represent a book of photographs rather than other subjects such as
dogs.
The narrative of the
images included sunsets (of) and social and aesthetic narratives such as industrial
chimneys against the sunset depicting disease (about) often with text because
the book was to raise money for charity.
“Their potential to
be, at once, undistinguished and prize-winning, clichéd and rich
with supporting meaning, is evidently the case with the overall ‘winning’
image, which, despite its ‘chocolate box’ appearance, was a photograph taken in
and of the Republic of Ireland, and was intended to function as a critical
political commentary on the nationalist limitations of One Day for Life’s
British focus at the time of the Troubles.” (Pollen,
A)
The digital culture has
made us more visually-literate times and artistically knowledgeable, and although
the dissemination of images has changed, preferred photographic subjects do not
differ much with photographs of friends, family and leisure still dominating. Even
advice is still similar to historical advice. Pollard argues that the amount of
images produced has increased significantly along with the number opportunities
for circulation.
Lynn Berger explains
that images become more stereotyped because people see thousands of images of
the same subject e.g. 6,000 photographs uploaded to Flickr each minute. In Penelope
Umbrico’s ongoing project of 8,730,221 Suns from Flickr (2011),
sunsets are the untouchable photographic subject. In 2006, she found half a
million photographs on Flickr. “She then cropped just the sun from
these images and printed a partial representation of the mass in a grouped
format that borders on the mathematical sublime. The title of this work changes
whenever the work is exhibited to reflect the ever-rising quantity of sunsets
available on Flickr on the day that the work is hung; currently there
are over 9 million examples. Umbrico says that “the title itself has become a
comment on the ever-increasing use of web-based photo-communities, and a
reflection on the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there.” (Pollen, A)
People continue to photograph sunsets and other clichés
because each photograph is exclusive to the photographer. Sunsets are still submitted
for competition or public appraisal, representing a lasting, shared significance.
Sunsets could be themed linguistically relating Victor Burgin to
photography – “signalling “repetition with different significations, or one
repeated picture with different captions… As
Richard Dyer has argued about stereotypes: they “are a very simple, striking,
easily-grasped form of representation but are none the less capable of
condensing a great deal of complex information and a host of connotations.”
(Pollen, A)
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