Is the artistic value of the photo checked with "angry" yellow colors or the pure white faces created thanks to the phone's App Store? Certainly not, because that is only the criterion of daily photography and "beauty technology" through images.
Character in artistic photos is highly symbolic, representing a generation, a generation in life. Those photos can be taken with the inspiration of photographers, often highly realistic, if taken in a unique moment, they will be high-value photos with unlimited vitality and transcend time.
When composing documentary photos, the photographer arranges them in his/her future work using lenses, camera angles, camera angles, landscape size, and real light. The characters in the photo are real people in an incident in a process of proceeding.
The time of pressing the camera will decide the vivid visual works, the decisive moments of the stories. During the composition process, the photographer can sometimes influence the character by requiring a re-work of the movement, recreating part of the process and position to master the camera angle, realistic lighting, and increase image efficiency.
In the book photography is like that (Treasemedia Moscow Publishing House 2013), Russian photographer and theorist Alecxandr Lapin wrote:
The hand of reality in the dark is more valuable
We are deceiving the noble...
"Real deception in darkness" can be understood as containing information, a record of the image, and "nobody deception" - that is the fiction of the great art world, of literature, poetry, or cinema, something that as we have seen, can absolutely appear in artistic photos".
The author of the book is a Russian photographer and art theorist, referring to the arrangement, story setting and estimation of space, expressed writing such as dance art, stage, cinema... Can photography be fictional and stylized? That can be done in a studio taking samples, where the photographer can play with light, create effects of light language, and estimate day and night according to artistic purposes.
In concept photography, the photographer can create scenery, props, and arrange characters to create stories that can be surreal and contain the author's philosophy. Literary photography can use rich shaping techniques using sophisticated software, using lighting language, such as photographers Olivier Valsecchi (France) or Misha Gorder ( Latvia) using human bodies as shaping material.
Vietnamese art photography has been developing strongly in both quantity and quality since the country's unification and opening. That is demonstrated through the awards in annual exhibitions. However, the beautiful photos, even very beautiful ones that we often see year after year, have all the beauty and soul of Vietnamese people?
Vietnamese photographers of recent generations have competed to create the image of Cham women through girls swimming through Nam Cuong sand hills. Only those who live with the Cham ethnic group in Tuan Tu village, An Hai commune, Ninh Phuoc, Ninh Thuan understand this to be untrue because the Cham people's tradition of the past only took village well water. Famous Cham painter Dang Nang Tho has complained many times: "That image is only done by self-made photographers. That creativity is too far away from Cham culture.
The recent "beautiful" and unreasonable photos have been "created" in another way in the endless sea of the Pacific Ocean when beautiful works by both us and the West (by Daniel Kordan - Russian photographer) have appeared continuously depicting fishermen on a hammock to catch seafood. Local photographers and even professional fishermen when looking at the photos said it was impossible. Regardless of the unreasonable nature of creating beautiful images, it is contrary to the realistic depiction of photography.
In another way, reflecting the beauty of Vietnamese people in life through arranging, or according to Lapin, is the "nobbelonging of the noble" that is also very common. The photo exhibitions of "Golden moment" a few years ago displayed photos of laundry workers and children playing near the ancient well in the foggy morning in Truong Yen and Chuong My Hanoi. In the photo, there is an old woman using a male goose to drop water on her nephew. I would like to ask that the well has been covered for a long time to avoid danger and the families there all use pumps to bring the well water up for use, not using buckets to scoop up water.
The image of using a chimney to create an early afternoon scene is also being overused. There are many photos of "art" with the smoke of the countryside, making some viewers think of the scene "The West burns down the house" in the film during the resistance war. Using models or actors to recreate the scene of rowing a boat to pick water lilies at Huong pagoda, arranging fishermen to pull a net on the polluted Red River section of Long Bien bridge, although the image is beautiful, it seems that this is not only not the true beauty of Vietnamese people but also unintentionally converts photography to imitating the way of creating music video clips, into a version of performing arts.
Professor, PhD in Arts at Leningrad University (former Soviet Union) - M. X. Kagan also shared: "Photography is not cinema! recreating life in such a way that it estimates space and time, photography loses itself, to become weak in the face of another art field, cinema, an industrial art field with a large production organization".
As mentioned above, implementing ideas for photography can completely arrange characters, even acting to express the author's intentions. However, at the recent VN 2024 National Art photography Exhibition, there were a few works that seemed to be more of an poster to encourage the media than artistic photos. That is the photo "Mom, where is your summer gone" by TMN author - Tien Giang criticizing parents for sending their children to school in excess and the work "Save me" by THS - Soc Trang reflecting on the situation of playing games among young people.
Although the two photos have different content, the way of expressing them is confusing because the main characters in the two photos are sitting in front of the same table. Photo by TMN - Tien Giang author is topical because the situation of overloaded children is still a hot topic in the press. But the way the image is expressed seems creative but is a sketchy illustration of the mother on the wall on the red Sunday calendar.
This correct and clear illustration is to downplay when an ideal photo is not metaphorical. On the other hand, if you look through it for a moment, any viewer will see unreasonable light because the tabletop light on the wall cannot be pointed at by the mother like that. Thiet thought that if studying at an art school specializing in photography, any student who did such a lighting exercise would be at high risk of being retaken.
