I'd like to begin by first stating what this essay is not about. What it is not is an attempt to add to the collective wisdom of the photographic arts as to what makes a good photograph. There are certainly thousands, if not tens of thousands, of academic and/or professionals in the art world who have a much clearer and learned sense of what constitutes good art than I do. My formal education and work experience is in Computer Science, not fine art, so consider these expressed opinions of a photographic layperson in that light (pardon the pun).

Aside: If you haven't read any writings of the late John Szarkowski, including such titles as Looking at photographs or The Photographer's Eye, then I implore you to do so.

My motivation for putting down these thoughts is to answer some of the questions asked of me after the two image critique sessions that I led this year, the most prevalent and, perhaps, the most important, being, "What do you think makes a good photograph?". It's an important question, and an interesting one, and I think that primarily it has a very subjective answer, but nonetheless an answer worthy of some individual thought and reflection.

If one types What makes a good photograph? into Google, you'll find scores of hits, many of which contain what I somewhat sarcastically call the "laws" of photographic composition:

• The simpler the composition, the better.
• Ensure that the photograph has one, and only one, subject. Choose subjects that are attractive and/or pleasing to the eye.
• Ensure that the main elements of the photograph are pin-sharp.
• Use the rule-of-thirds to prevent dead-center, static images.
• Combine elements in the image by abstracting them as lines, circles, triangles, rectangles, and combine them into a composition as a whole.

and so on. All of us have seen this "recipe" in one form or another, and each statement in this "recipe" has at least some significance in many photographs. However, what makes the question "What makes a good photograph?" such an interesting one to debate is that the world of photography is replete with counterexamples of these "laws", and many of these counterexamples serve as iconic images of the medium.

Let me offer some well-known examples. Take, for instance, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Nick Ut of Vietnam Napalm, which won the World Press photograph of the year in 1972. This is not a photograph of a pleasing subject by any means: near the center of the frame is a nine-year-old Vietmanese child, Kim Phuc, who has suffered terrible burns as the result of a South Vietmanese napalm attack on her village, Trang Bang. Nor is the composition a simple one.

As another example, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is a portrait, but hardly a portrait in the same sense of one taken by, say, Yousef Karsh, a photographer whose work I greatly admire. Given Lange's photograph's caption, Destitute peapickers in California; a 32-year old mother of seven children on the surface it is somewhat surprising that this photograph remains so famous as an example of great photography, and not, simply, as a documentary record of the effects of the Great Depression.

As a third example, I offer Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1932 image, Derriere la Gare St. Lazare. From a "technical" standpoint, the photograph is significantly flawed: the image itself is quite grainy, the sky is predominately a single tone of gray without drama or detail, and little of the photograph is in focus, including the man stepping off the wood ladder, who is in motion. Yet this image remains one of most famous photographs of all time. Frank Horvat writes:

The photograph "Derriere Saint-Lazare", about which I have been asked to comment, is a good example of this kind of misunderstanding: many people get ecstatic about the coincidence between the leap of the man and the dancer on the poster. To me this is not the main point: what makes this a great photo is of course the "geometry", but even more
the "subject matter", which is a complex relation between several stories and feelings, that cannot be expressed by words: if it could, what would be the point of photography?

I believe that it is precisely this notion of feeling that is essential to What makes a good fine art photograph?. In a podcast published last year, Brooks Jensen, editor of Lenswork Magazine, paraphrased an old Kodak brochure that said:

A good photograph is one that makes the viewer so aware of the subject they are unaware of the print.

and revised it to

A good [fine art] photograph is one that makes the viewer so aware of its emotional content that the viewer is unaware of the print.

To put it another way, with this idea the viewer is drawn into the image at an emotional level, rather than (merely) at a visual one. Jensen makes two additional points in relation to this. Firstly, the Kodak interpretation, in his view, puts photography too much in the genre of "reproduction", and for this reason the Kodak quotation is far too simplistic. Secondly, rather than merely reproduction a good photograph represents an expression of human emotion: not in the restrictive, contemporary sense, but rather in a more classical sense: feeling, thought, experience, insight, revelation, and other human emotions.

So much for the definition of a good photograph, if the single statement above can serve as one. An equally good question is what constitutes a bad photograph; that is, what the qualities of a photograph that prevent or hinder the viewer from achieving the level of emotion necessary to consider the photograph a "good" one. Once again, I turn to Brooks Jensen for some help. In another podcast in 2007, subsequent to the first on "good" photographs, Jensen described five qualities of a "bad" photograph, in order of relative importance:

1. pretentious. The photograph is supposed to be about something meaningful or important, but it is not.
2. arrogance. The photographer has approached the portrayal of the subject with what Jensen describes as a condescending attitude. The photographer has attempted to construct a "definitive" photograph that not only portrays the subject from a single point of view, but also (seemingly) dictates that the only way to view the subject is from that angle, with no room for interpretation by the viewer.
3. shallowness. Here, Jensen communicates his distaste for images that are common or ordinary: mere descriptions of something. A description of the subject is one thing, but interpretation is something else entirely. In his view, it is essential that the photographer attempt to portray a point of view to the subject. It can be exceedingly difficult to find the balance between shallowness and arrogance, but the best work does find that balance.
4. boredom. The photograph is one that does not engage you at any level: it is forgettable, banal, unmemorable.
5. technical flaws. In and of itself, technical flaws: too contrasty in places, out of focus in others, particular compositional elements lacking or out of place, may not kill a particular photograph, but any of the first four always do.

In Jensen's list, technical flaws are last of his first five "image killers". Rather, it is a lack of interesting components, or of any interpretation of the subject by the photographer, that will turn the viewer away. To a great extent, it is precisely our emotive response to a photograph that answers the subjective question What makes this photograph interesting to you? I submit that it is possible to trigger positive, emotive responses from a photograph regardless of the subject, because even the most banal objects can make interesting photographs. One example is Edward Weston's iconic Pepper #30. More recently, a second example is from our own club program: Highland Glen members may recall Susan Dobson's presentation from two years ago entitled Interiors. The genius of Dobson's work is that she can create compelling images from simple interior scenes that we visualize everyday - a child's bedroom, a kitchen, a basement area filled with old toys - and turn them into interesting photographs.

Each of us bring a personal, subjective point of view to what makes a "good photograph". It is rare, even for a collector of fine art photography, to hang a print that does not reflect personal attitudes towards the subject matter. On the other hand, the subject alone is not sufficient to warrant the framing of a photograph. Nor, I would argue, are technical merits alone sufficient, or even necessary. Rather, photographs that we find compelling, interesting, or draw some other response from the depths of our souls are much more likely to find a special place on our walls. A secret to what constitutes a good photograph, then, may be nothing more than this: those qualities of the image that make it compelling not just to ourselves, but to others as well.