GOING STRAIGHT, WITH A DETOUR

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I DON’T PRECISELY KNOW WHAT THE TERM “STRAIGHT OUT OF THE CAMERA” MEANS, and I suspect that you don’t, either.

As a phrase, SOOC is now more the expression of an ideal than any accurate reflection of a process.  In the years since on-line file sharing began to codify our photographic work into broad categories (the easier to keep track of things, my dear) this baffling abbreviation has began to crop up more and more. You know the stated intent; to create groupings that are defined by images in which no manipulation or processing was ever added, ever ever, pinky swear on a stack of Ansel Adams essays. But just as with terms like “natural” or “monochrome”, SOOC tends to obscure meaning rather than enhance it; that is, it refers to something that is supposed to be desirable without explaining why.

We are given role models to admire and emulate; legends like Cartier-Bresson are historically held up as paragons of SOOC. The stories are repeated for each new generation: He never spent any appreciable time framing a shot in advance….no editor ever cropped a single one of his shots….and so on, into the realm of holy myth. But so flaming what if all that were even true? What additional authenticity or impact is conferred on a picture just because its author never touched it again after the shutter click? Beyond the wonderful vanity that our first vision of something could be so profound that no further action or intervention is needed to render it complete, does that mean anything more than someone who solved a crossword in under twenty minutes, or managed to go three years without eating dairy? I mean, on one level, I get it. We would all love to claim the mantle of auteur, creating our own perfectly realized art without assistance or adjustment. This my creation, and mine alone. It’s a pleasing fantasy.

But that’s all that it is.

The image you seen here is, by my lights, as close to SOOC as I personally ever get. And yet: I cropped it, leveled it, raised the luminance on the reds and oranges. I did, in fact, mess with it, though not in a majorly transformative way. This is called a “tweak”. Granted, it took a lot less intervention since the master shot generally worked out as planned. The result was a collaboration, if you like, between Shooting Me and Editing Me, and I’m fine with that. Here’s the deal: in creating a “straight out of the camera” category, image sharing sites have, for good or ill, drawn a line between preferred and regrettable, between instinctive genius and “coping well”, and that bothers me. Art cannot be crammed into ill-fitting “worthy” or “less than” pigeonholes. When that happens, it becomes “less than”, well, art.