Towards concrete photography?

Webbed flower, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Summary: Photography should not be about telling a story or being interesting. Instead, it should be hard, like concrete.

Anonymous commented (again) my rambling thoughts on Why there is no story in my photos, here is a quote:

I often find with my writing, particularly poetry, that the meaning of what i write evolves with every time I revisit and read it.

In a way, like photography, poetry captures the reality of a moment, or of an emotion, and the story/meaning of that poetry is different depending on the interpretation.

If I were to rephrase my question as: "When you decide to press the shutter release, why do you decide to press it at that moment? Why do you choose to include the things you have in the frame? Why do you choose to exclude other things?" I would love to know how you would respond.

This is so insightful, that I'm almost at loss for words. But perhaps there is something here I can try to answer, but this probably is not quite what was asked.

After thinking about the photography vs. poetry comparison I must admit that there is a lot of similarity, but within each genre there is probably quite a lot of variation. I would imagine that there are poets and photographers who "shoot" seldom but precisely, making each shot count.

And there are other poets and photographers who do a lot of chaff, but also produce hits every once in a while. Of course, what is published is in this case is just a small portion of the total work produced, and what matters is the process of selecting the good from the bad.

I'm more of the experimenting type, producing a lot of waste but every once in a while something which seems worth preserving. And this process of selection is interesting in itself. What is the criteria separating a "wasted" photo from one deemed to be of some value?

Here I think we must return also to the act of shooting, which is the first step in the selection process. Why this and not that? Why from here and not from there?

Here I feel that there is no pre-defined rules, no great recipes for success. You can't do photography without a camera, just thinking about it. (At least this is how I see it.) What you see on the screen (or in the viewfinder) is either worth shooting or not.

But why I'm trying to defend a position that photography should not be about interestingness or telling a story? One reason is that I feel human beings are inventing stories just to entertain ourselves, there is no deeper meaning in them. Here I'm thinking about a kind of realist position, saying that reality does not operate according to stories, it just is.

There is also some reason which arise from the kind of person I am. I grow up on a farm, so there is a deep down-to-earth practical approach to life grown in. However, in my studies and career I have worked mostly with abstractions, first physics, mathematics and computer science, and later on with processes, plans of action, strategies and other such tools of the corporate management culture.

I especially loathe the term "interesting" when referring to photography, because it is usually a synonym for "popular". You can of course argue that physics and mathematics are also interesting, but I would say that few people would use them as examples of interesting topics. Thus, I'm hoping to find something interesting in photography, but here you have to define the term interesting as "deep", "insightful", or even "hard".

In fact, this reminds me of the term "concrete mathematics", a term coined by Knuth et al. You could expect that concrete here would mean more practical or easy mathematics, but actually the opposite is true - the mathematics in question is very hard (like concrete). And when speaking of interesting photographs you could also use the term "concrete photography", meaning hard photography, if there is such a term.