Penny plain

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way”.

That was John Ruskin, and he knew a thing or two.

This takes me back to my ramblings about ‘fine art’ photography, where I argue that photography can be art, but using the word fine is pretentious. Ruskin, I think, is talking about communication, and photography does this too. Leaving aside the art, meaning interpretation, we have the communication of an idea, a situation or a story. What I think Ruskin said was to communicate simply.

I have encountered this in technical writing, where I am trying to impart a conclusion and a proposed outcome based on evidence. The problem here is the curse of knowledge and the missing thread. The curse of knowledge is that the writer knows a lot about their subject and skips the explanations or the steps that lead to a conclusion. I could tell you it’s a mistake to fit the mains sensor that triggers a backup generator on the output side, or I could describe a mains failure followed by a series of brrrrrm-click noises. Either way, it depends on you having some idea what a backup generator is and does. The curse of knowledge would be to assume you know what I know. How would that work in photography? Probably by assuming the viewer knows the context of a picture or about the people in it.

Speaking of context…

You can play the Tapping Game to experience the curse of knowledge for yourself. One person thinks of a tune and taps the rhythm on a table. The other player(s) have to guess the tune. It’s obvious to the person tapping and impossible for the listeners. (Unless you cheat and tap in Morse).

The missing thread is when you lose or bury the main idea and the steps that lead to it. Journalists call it burying the lede. Throwing all your research onto the page can lose the conclusion, for example. Telling the story in the wrong order can lose the power of story-telling. In photography it would be including things that are not the subject or the story or not being clear what the subject is. I think this is a key part of what Ruskin said: make the message clear and easy to see. To quote someone else – “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. So perhaps that is part of the art of photography, to show and tell as clearly and simply as possible? And if we’re in the quoting mood, let’s have some Piet Hein:

There is 
one art,
no more, 
no less: 
to do
all things 
with art-
lessness. 

What’s the story here?

So good advice all round from Mr Ruskin: show clearly what you mean, as simply as possible. Well, that’s most of my pictures in the bin. I will try harder (just like all my old school reports said I should).

PS – The title comes from “penny plain, twopence coloured”. Source.