Knowledge, skill, experience and photography

Yesterday’s post on novelty, difficulty, and ego in photography sparked some discussion on DPR that wandered off in a direction that I hadn’t anticipated and that was interesting to me. It amounts to a division of the word difficulty into two realms. The first is the difficulty that the photographer experienced in making the image in question. That’s what I was talking about. The second perspective on difficulty is related to the experience, maturity, and learning that brought the photographer to the point where they could create that image. Consider Henri Cartier-Bresson. I’ve seen his contact sheets, so I know that the truth is more complex than the myth, but let’s go with the myth for the purposes of this discussion. In the HCB story, our intrepid photographer is wandering the streets of Paris waiting for something to catch his eye, whereupon he lifts the camera to his face, focuses, and captures “the decisive moment.” In that scenario, the difficulty of making the exposure is not…