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Cropping and street photography…are you a slave to your ego?


Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

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APUG / Photrio didn't like my photos so they kicked me out a long time ago. But I still read it once in a while. They had a post on the never ending debate on cropping and street work.

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/cropping-and-street-photography.172596/

This debate is just one of ego. I once saw a terribly crooked photo by Cartier-Bresson of a bullring at a museum. He would have rather presented a crooked photo than straighten and crop it...it is all ego. It is the photogs job to present the best they can, unless they aspire showing garbage as Winogrand was prone to do.

If it works uncropped, great, but most of my street work is cropped. Now, if you are working for job and they demand no crop or you are a crime scene photog, then sure cropping could be bad. But if you are just working for yourself, crop or uncrop...it just does not matter...unless you are a slave to your ego. I once read on a forum that the photog said if a photo had to be cropped it was not meant to be taken. Another said if they stopped making film they would give up photography. Both egomaniacs that serve their ego before the photo.

To me, the successful photo has a poetic flow to it. This flow can be one of harmony or one of discord. Whatever it is…the photo flows. This poetic flow is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. It is the same with the successful poem vs. a mass of meaningless words. One has poetic flow, the other does not. The poetic flow makes it stick in our mind. Sometimes the situation does not allow for much poetic flow. You just want to record that moment in time. That is how I think of poetry as it relates to photography. In any case I use all the tools available to me to make the best poetic flow I can with my photos.

With my work I seldom show the uncropped, non-post processed photos. That stuff follows you around for life once it is on the internet. Why show your junk? But once in a while I show some examples for the die-hards that say don't crop, don't post process, etc. And it may help the newbies that think everything is always perfect.

Here is one of Mike Busey at one of his infamous parties. Mike is the brother of actor Gary Busey. It is from my project The Americans...60 years after Frank. I could not get any closer, so made do with what I could get. You can see for yourself what basic cropping and some dodging and burning can do.

If I was a Photoshopper I guess I could have done better removing unwanted things. In my case I don't know how to use Photoshop and just get by with Lightroom. And in the big picture, once you start doing too much bullshit to a photo it loses it reportage value and it becomes just fiction.

As a social documentary photog I try not to stray from the material honesty of the photo or main message the photo conveys. Cropping, dodging and burning are the basics we all did in the wet darkroom back in the day. I carry over those same techniques into my digital work to prefect a photo's poetic flow. It is strong NSFW so don't complain if you decide to look at it at the link.

NSFW

https://danielteolijr.wordpress.com/2020/01/26/cropping-and-street-photography-are-you-a-slave-to-your-ego/

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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I don't think it's ego to not crop (or maybe it is, but then all art is ego) -- artists often set creative boundaries to work within, so some won't crop, some print to show the edges of the frame, etc.  That's fine.  It's also fine to crop, whatever works for the artist.  It's not about obtaining technical perfection.  Whenever someone says that for something to be art, then "x" has to be done by the all artists, that person is creating a rule that may not be universally accepted.  Saying that an artist must crop if it would improve the composition or that they must correct the level in a photo is that sort of rule.

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