The imperfections serve as a kind of verfremdungseffekt, making the viewer aware that he's looking at a photograph, rather than at a person. As such René Magritte comes to mind. It is fascinating that he made his own camera, though. That certainly adds to the quality of the images, though it's of course a kind of non-diegetic contents. He said, with a wry smile.

Is it just me or has the quality of GPT-3 comments declined recently?

I'm almost certain the parent is not an AI. Perhaps it's just that I have no idea what they are talking about.

Had to look these up:

verfremdungseffekt = distancing effect, something devised to cause you to not identify on an emotional level with the subjects or the action in the scene, but to see the image from a more dispassionate intellectual perspective. Magritte was mentioned because his work often "breaks the fourth wall," directly addressing the viewer instead of the more traditional painterly approach of creating drama in the scene.

non-diegetic content = content which is not part of the world of the scene itself. The scratches on the photos aren't part of the world that the subjects live in.

I don't think even Alan Turing himself ever envisioned this.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I already passed the Voight-Kampff test. Didn't even need to fire my gun! :) As for GPT-3, well, it needs real input—like the above—to generate its contents. Here's a crude fore-runner taking postmodern discourse to the extreme: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Cheers. I genuinely can't tell the difference between the artificially generated postmodern discourse that is supposed to be just gibberish and real postmodern discourse that is not. Perhaps this is just a case of extreme jargon overload that makes it unintelligible for anyone who is not part of the group?

Or is this some commentary on the futility of the discourse, and postmodern discourse is just a performance art?

I'm not even sure myself, and I spent two years studying it.

Kind of taken aback by all the people saying these are just shitty photos. I think they are gorgeous... Do y'all think Lo-fi music is just shitty music too?

I guess its a little unsurprising coming from the usual HN crowd lmao.

> Do y'all think Lo-fi music is just shitty music too?

Yes.

Agreed, they are really beautiful. The bike in motion and dancing feet in particular

I agree - the aesthetics are amazing here - uniquely stylized. It looks easy to do but I don’t think it was and to imagine this aesthetic in this medium is cool. I’d hang these.

Funny, without context (that I am unwilling to pursue atm, just skipped the whole article for the photos) they just look terrible pictures. Period.

It looks to me like the pictures may have been for his... uhh... own self-gratification.

Had that reaction too, and it's not just us :)

"Tichy was frequently arrested for hanging around the local pool and snapping pictures of unsuspecting women."

https://www.howardgreenberg.com/artists/miroslav-tich

Though he seems to have made quite a lot of effort in the handmade cameras and deliberate processing techniques.

I think many of them are great and it has little to do with the “quality” being bad.

I truly believe their are two kind of appreciators of art in the world.

1. People who like realism, photoshopped pictures, GGI in media, etc.

vs.

2. Modern art, film noir, Black & white classical movies, etc.

If you give the second a chance, you might be suprised what your imagination does. I used to be kinda a #1 guy with the exception of bad action filmed CGI movies, but completely changed as the years went by. I've even gotten to the point where I think color in film has ruined a lot of movies, along with digital.

I truly believe that you can’t divide appreciators of art in simple, unnuanced, mutually exclusive categories. Specially just 2 like you did.

I don’t see myself in either category, at the same time that I do remember appreciating things that would fit both.

Adding context does little to change that, unfortunately.

I could understand if they evoked some kind of emotions or served as a deconstruction of photography technique, but most of them just look like deliberately bad photographs to me.

Then again, I'm only an amateur at photography.

I'd guess they invoked nostalgia in other photographers at the time about their old bad photos, so they thought it was brilliant. Like an inside thing only they understood.

I like them and it's simply because they evoke an intellectual and emotional reaction. That's art.

I get nothing from them. Does that make them not art?

For you, perhaps. I don't think there is an objective truth of "this is art, this is not art." I shared my experience of the pictures with you. Art is the experience of Art imo.

A large part of how you experience something is the context though. If people tell you something is great before showing then you are more likely to find something great about it, etc. So with that reasoning a large part of art is just telling people that it is art, it isn't the work itself but the belief that it is art that creates the art.

Context matters immensely. That’s why I can’t imagine posting an thought-provoking non-ironic short on, e.g., YouTube, knowing that it will be immediately accompanied by calls to watch 100 funniest fails and (with all my love for these creatures) wild foxes being pet or cockatoos mimicking cat meowing, and that a significant number of viewers will watch it while sitting in a toilet.

Contrasting with galleries, museums, private exhibitions surviving off subsidies or entrance fees—and I don’t think it’s as simple as “it’s just a new way of viewing that you don’t like because it’s new”—what we have settled for are “free” ad-supported platforms that are in effect much closer to casinos and malls, and to which convincing a visitor to not leave directly equals revenue.

There is, of course, this flip side, where presenting any visually unoriginal, self-gratifying, etc. work in context of an exhibition gives it not-necessarily-deserved value; and it could be that the ability to make the viewer feel something you want them to feel despite all that widely varying context is a valid skill.

I could have such an experience with nature, but nature isn't the same thing as art.

I just think art is poorly defined.

>without context

That's an effect of perspective. Knowing the fact that the "home made" appearance is deliberate changes the photos from being random bad photos to being commentary.

Having seen 100s of high def birds, mountains, weddings, even pro photos are pretty repetitive.

These say interpretive art to me more than every pixel of yet another nature shot, or airbrushed person. They make my imagination curious about the world within.

When all the details are there just as they would be outside, why not just go outside?

Yup, you can't just take awful photos and say "these are good actually". Well, in the art world you can get away with that kind of nonsense. But to most people those are just terrible photos.

There are various philosophical and artistic movements for which art should not look like art. Others are about art being abstract, inaccessible and incomprehensible. Others yet are about use of archaic techniques to blend a modern eye with faux nostalgia (proto-hipsters, one could say).

There is not one kind of art.

Art does not need to be popular or broadly understood to be art.

You are not a majority anyway.

Good taste, feeling, and emotions are personal.

There is no contradiction between something being both a terrible photo (or painting or sculpture) from a technical perspective and art.

I agree that you can’t just take awful photos and say “these are good actually,” but I think these are incredible! Haven’t enjoyed a photo series as much as these in a long time.

I suppose, as they say, there really is no accounting for taste. My own included, of course.

That holds in other art too. there is a current trend in modern art to create the most child-like, simplest, crayon crap that you can still sell at a Mega for millions lol. Very easy to make fun of but people like it.

Here's a couple that I don't actually mind too much, but still not my cup of tea.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/misaki-kawai/works-for-sale https://www.artsy.net/artist/maja-djordjevic/works-for-sale

you mean like the curvy wall?

https://www.streetartbln.com/blu-murals-painted-over/

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/cuvry-brache-in-berlin-...

The oil painting looking like ms paint scribbling is kind of interesting. I wouldn't hang it up though.

Well, I took a look, they are just bad photos to me. I could not find any redeeming quality.

I'm a photographer and I'll be honest, I clicked on these fully expecting to not like them (usually when people say "look at these photos, they look like terrible photos taken with a bad camera until you, like, get it, man" what they really mean is that the photographer knew the right pretentious people at the right time in history)...

... but I actually like them. I wish I could explain why; he's doing some clever stuff here. Some of it is kinda pervy and it feels like TMI, but he's at least being clever. There are a few photos that feel like you are voyeuristically peeking through time, the defects in the photos are like peeking through bushes to see something interesting. But mostly I can't explain why I like it. I just do.

I don't have a professional eye but I'll try to explain why I like one of the photos, the one identified as Photo 20, in which there are two sunbathers, the one on the right flirtatiously peering at the camera. I like the way that their images are just barely recognizable as such but they still look like real people in a candid moment. The resolution is so poor can't even see where the second woman's back ends and where the background begins. But with just a hint you can make out a smile and a sparkling eye. It's similar to the way a clever caricature captures the essence of the subject with a few strokes. Are there flowers in their hair? A checkered blanket? The mind's eye starts to fill in the details as when reading a novel. You can't make out anything clearly but it still feels there's a whole story that the viewer is being invited to share in.

I'm curious, show an example of what you consider to be good photos, if you don't mind taking a moment.

I don't think I can explain to you by showing an example. Also, I type this on a phone and don't have access to my collection.

A good photo looks interesting or has something interesting in it or comes with some interesting context.

These are more or less random photos taken with a bad camera. That's it.

Now, I don't say you need good camera for good photos. You can make interesting photos with any camera. And you can also use bad camera for interesting effect.

But, again, these photos don't show any kind of plan, thought, deliberation, interesting subject, context, technique, nothing.

To each their own opinion I guess, but these photos are more than just random shots taken with a bad camera. Not all of them are especially good but there is a conscious intent of showing us the world through a slightly novel perspective and in some of the shots, with quite a visually poetic effect (the dancing feet are one good example).

Knowing the context and the work he must have put into building the camera, maintaining it and later developing his shots under the circumstances he worked with also helps. What I definitely don't see here is just a bunch of bad photos taken with a bad camera. I'd hardly call a homemade camera as simply bad, even imperfect it merits some respect.

I'd say they at least fit Susan Sontag's loose definition of photography showing others something novel.

> A good photo looks interesting or has something interesting in it or comes with some interesting context.

To my eye, these photos have all three of those things.

You don't have to like them yourself, but it seems a bit much to imply that they are objectively without value as art.

> You don't have to like them yourself, but it seems a bit much to imply that they are objectively without value as art.

There is nothing objective about art anyway.

I agree with you, though. There is something in these. Some kind of motion. Some kind of primitive, wild instincts as well. As if a bear had found a camera, and he were more interested by ladies than about anything else.

A good photo does not need to be interesting, since it doesn't need to appeal to intellect to be good. A photo can be good just by provoking an emotional reaction in the viewer.

From the wikipedia article: "...using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials"

I mean... I don't know if I'd take perfect pictures with such equipment, especially not if I'm trying to do it secretly.

This is not about technical quality. They just don't look or have anything interesting in them.

I think I've used that 'homemade camera' Instagram filter.

These are just creepshots.

Curious, is "more badly" here an intentional joke? Or did he mean "want it badly" in the sense of really wanting something?

Just a rough translation of "Když chcete být slavní, musíte něco dělat tak blbě, že tak blbě to nikdo ve světě neudělá". "...you have to do something in such a silly manner, that nobody in the world did it so silly" or such.

It's itentional. He starts with, "First of all, you have to have a bad camera".

Back when "street photography" meant snooping on unsuspecting women with zoom lenses

You need to examine the visual history of street photography much better if this is the only silly summary you can come up with about generations of work done with all sorts of interesting concepts and themes. What an absurd, smarmy and parochial judgement of such a broad photographic field.

Are you a woman? Who has been snooped on by men with zoom lenses they've made in their shed?

And how exactly is that specific context relevant to the rest of my point? Is this site saturated by people with null artistic appreciation outside an obsession with highly specific criticisms of very particular things?

It's specific to the context of discussing Miroslav Tichý's art, which is what this thread is about. Street photography is great, not sure where you mistook me