I've just started reading an old, old book called Achieving Photographic Style by Michael Freeman, and what I'm going to do here in this entry is not much more than quote some of Freeman's words in his introduction.

What is explored in this book is the process of making photographs, a matter which is of much more importance to me, a professional photographer, than any subsequent discussions on artistic merit. If there is something to be learned from the way the most experienced photographers work, it surely lies in their decision-making at the time, not in subsequent rationalizations.

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Susan Sontag lays down stringent condition: 'To be legitimate as an art, photography must cultivate the notion of the photographer as auteur and of all photographs taken by the same photographer as constituting a body of work.'

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To qualify as an art it (photography) needs little more than a declaration of intent by the artist-photographer, or a declaration of recognition by anyone who wants to try his or her luck as an art critic. Now whether it is good or bad art is an entirely different question, and definitely not to be rolled into the same discussion. The most succinct piece of common sense that I have seen written on the subject comes from Peter Rose Pulham who, in 1952 said, 'The question, whether or not photography is an arthas always seemed to me irritating, meaningless and beside the point. If photography is used merely as a technical process to record some visible fact, it is an adjunct to science. But if it is used to express, since all expression is emotional, selective and personal, it cannot avoid the use of art.'

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Freeman further quotes Cecil Beaton and Gail Buckland, who offer the following: 'We can but answer that if a dozen expert photographers are given the same subject and conditions, their pictures would be just as different as if a dozen painters had been set the same task.' This has a special relevance to the title of this book, for it is the perceived ability and imagination of 'expert photographers' that give them what many people would call style.

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The elusive quality of style, it seems to me, is more than a facile identification tag for individual photographers. It involves a visual coordination of the subject matter and the two-dimensional form of the image -- a coordination that does some justice to its subject by showing it in such a way that it enhances or challenges our understanding of it.

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...what helps to produce good photography is sensitivity to and awareness of the subject, rather than the hunt for a trick, technique, or visual fad to distinguish one photographer's work from that of everyone else. 'In photography', said Susan Sontag, 'the subject matter always pushes through.' And that is as it should be.

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I could have used some of these insights in a debate I (and others) had with the airbrush artist Dru Blair over a year ago. His argument -- which wasn't particularly compelling -- hinged on the idea that the camera is a machine, a tool, that does no more than catching a slice of reality. (Personally, I think he places little value on a work that "takes so little time." Perhaps the instanaeity of the camera's click bothers him because he spends hours working on near photo-realistic paintings of Star Trek's Enterprise hovering in space above portraits of the spaceship's crew.) In any event, I think there's a great deal of art that goes into the photographer's perception and interpretation of his or her subject matter.

The idea that the "camera never lies" may be true, but its product, the photograph, is rarely a trustworthy representative of reality.