How to recognise a kitsch photo in 3 steps

mrawie wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 10:35  | reply

You can of course philosophize endlessly about what is and isn't Kitsch. Yet I miss one element in Elvira Smit's description of Kitsch: that is "pretension". Kitsch pretends, for example, to be "art", or "literature". And I don't see that in her photo; I find it sweet, a nice little view, a pleasant reminder of a holiday; but it isn't pretentious. And there is nothing wrong with lovely souvenir photos, only they are often not that interesting to strangers.

I really find photos of streams of water and waterfalls where the water looks like floating mist kitsch I call them yoghurt photos. You are not depicting reality but a fashion trend and almost everyone thinks it looks beautiful. If you then take a standard holiday photo of reality that looks like something that has already been shown more often people talk about kitsch? Everyone photographs in their own way whether someone else finds that kitsch is totally unimportant.

Mabel Amber wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 13:09  | reply

I would rather talk about the "photographic cliché", by that I mean a well-worn theme.

But even then, you can distinguish different degrees of quality, both technically and in terms of content.

In short, be careful with a judgment and study the subject matter first before dismissing a so-called "kitsch" photo (or cliché, whatever you want to call it) as junk.

kitsch .... not artistic ... beautiful, not beautiful .... straight out of camera or endlessly edited ... raw or jpg ... does it mean something to you or do you want to show off with it ??

I think no photo is kitsch, at most meaningless to others.
If you want to create masterpieces then you have to put a lot of effort into it Or be very lucky
Ineke

willyduvel wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 13:49  | reply

What is art …………..and for whom ??

Poses, lighting techniques and the rule of thirds. Straight-up invitations to make kitsch photos!!!
Also the photo trips to faraway places, photogenic locations and safaris produce a copy of what has been captured before and are therefore kitsch.... Is that what is being suggested??
I have a different view of kitsch and that comes down to "too much of a good thing".
That is how I keep the pleasure of making attractive-looking photos alive and dare to experiment with examples that appeal to me....
How is it with you guys???

Stef wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 14:32  | reply

I definitely recognize this, because I fall into it often enough myself. I also find it difficult to make a somewhat original photo. Many subjects and techniques such as coloring and buttermilk streams have already been captured so often that it is difficult to make an interesting shot. Everyone looks at a photo in a different way, the amateur photographer critically and the layperson by what is in fashion at the moment. What also plays a role, I think, is the comment "not according to the rules", which can limit you in your creativity. As an example, two years ago I visited a photo exhibition with a number of beautiful landscape photos ,after the second round it struck me that although the locations differed, the shots all did not have the horizon in the middle, a path or stream that leads somewhere, 1/3, 2/3 etc. These rules are of course applicable but also make the photo predictable, not to say clichéd. What I find important is, do you make the photo to enjoy it yourself, or do you make them for other viewers? I think this could also become an endless discussion. Why do you choose hobby photography, of course also because you want to distance yourself from the everyday rules and really let yourself go in your hobby. So many people, so many opinions.

I quickly looked it up in Van Dale: anything that is not genuinely sentimental or not truly artistic, but tries to be. (pseudo-art). The pretension of being something it is not, that is the essence of it in my opinion. Then taste or preference no longer has such an influence either.

Even a photo of something that has already been photographed 1000x can still be found beautiful because of special details.
The photo where it all started has much more to it than you see at first glance. The reflection on the terrace is beautiful, the shadows on the beach, the hammocks and the tent in the background surprising. If all that had been cropped out, there would indeed be a boring, worthless sunset left, but is that really kitsch? And then there is also 'camp', kitsch on purpose, those may well be some Pisa photos that still have meaning for the maker because the girlfriend he is now no longer with is holding up the tower. Indeed, endless discussions, but interesting!

Bernard wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 15:49  | reply

Kitsch... nice that you bring it up. Without a concrete definition, and therefore no measure to use for comparison, I would say. But even if there were one, could you still determine what is kitsch and what is not? By now I think there is no place left in the world that has not already been photographed or snapped. Snapped may actually be a better word than photographed, because taking a snapshot is no longer a problem these days. Almost everyone has a smartphone. That immediately brings me to another criterion for kitsch, if everyone has already snapped everything, can you even still speak of kitsch at all. Owning a smartphone creates a completely different problem these days: during an event, thousands of photos of the same thing are taken. What happens to them? Why do people prefer to take snaps rather than experience/feel the event? At home they all look at what they could have seen live. Only if you can add something personal, artistic or unique to a photo would you say that it is not kitsch, but where do you draw the distinction then? Just look at painting. There are countless portrait paintings by old masters. All one layer: the portrait of someone. Yet all those paintings fall under the heading of art, usually with a capital A, and we do not discard the Frans Hals portraits because we already have enough Rembrandts. We also consider a self-portrait by Picasso (non-figurative) to be art. That may well be the tipping point. When is it kitsch and when is it art?

Mabel Amber wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 16:20  | reply

@Elvira

I was the guy who asked the question about "shooting from the hip", but the Photofacts system is behaving strangely, because I WAS logged in. Now on to the "snapshot".

To be honest, I do think you should post a "Good" photo to illustrate your theme and not just a snapshot without any further qualities, sorry, but I am being honest about this.

Here you have a series of so-called "Kitsch" photos, but within the genre they are high-quality photos, both in terms of quality and content:

https://pixabay.com/images/search/beach%20sea/

@ Bernard: I get excited about this; yes! that's how it is!
It is comparable to the Russian matryoshka doll.
But still; what Elvira is liking now on pixabay; beautiful, isn't it, that is therefore not kitsch (I think) that is SEEING with capital letters.
The image is fascinating.
I sometimes show it to my sweetheart, when there is a photo on my phone: then I show that 'other' crop; that too makes a world of difference! For me it is about the composition of the plane.
Example: in the foreground the youngest child with just a little bit of jam still on the lips (because that was on the pancake). In the background: her little brother, who is walking with an empty plate. You can just SEE that the boy is walking to the kitchen. He knows that that's where the supplies are! Quickly snapped on a phone. With the result: world photo. No kitsch. How often will such a photo have been taken?
(Take a very small grain of salt with this; I am trying to look objectively at this photo, but these children do belong to our family ....... )edit such a photo? Hmm
Don't.
Exceptionally beautiful 'much-discussion' this. Chapeau!

This weekend I visited the photography museum and the municipal museum. So Erwin Olaf also made quite a lot of kitsch photos??? Or am I seeing that wrong?

Bernard wrote on Tuesday 12 March 2019 at 21:48  | reply

@Anton. It keeps getting better. If I understand correctly, kitsch is about art. Or at least something that is supposed to pass for art. In that respect, your list is missing: Dorus Rijkers with a sou'wester, the black-and-white drawing of a little deer (always to be found on a draped cloth on the mantelpiece) and wrought-iron fish on a piece of natural stone. Yes, apparently I am from the same generation (1946).

As far as photography and kitsch are concerned, I think you hit the nail on the head. Namely: WHO determines WHAT is kitsch. Your examples are clear and speak for themselves. At home we had a bellows camera with 120 film with 6x9cm negatives. Even with that camera it could take years before the film was full. Later, at the beginning of the 1970s, I went on holiday with 2 or sometimes even 3 Agfa CT18 35mm slide films. Mind you, that was good for 72 or 108 exposures, of which 30% did not meet my quality standards and ended up in the bin. These days I take it easy and shoot an average of 2500 photos a year at 30MPix (Canon EOS 5DmkIV). But I also shoot with my iPhone and reason: if you don't shoot, you might miss a precious moment.

To return to the original question once more: "How do you recognize a kitsch photo in three steps?", it is simple for me to answer. I only need 1 step. I need that one step to form MY opinion and immediately point out that my opinion is not, or need not be, someone else's opinion. One particular thing really has to be said, and was already mentioned earlier by @Martin Hermes, the so-called yoghurt photo of a waterfall with an ND filter and long shutter speeds. If there is something truly terrible in my eyes, that is it. But whole hordes of people swear by it and show me that I have no feeling for beauty

I find photographers who claim to make art especially pretentious. You could call photos by these photographers kitsch without a doubt.

If we now agree that we will never say again: 'this is kitsch' but always the sentence
'I find this kitsch' and possibly add a personal motivation, then in my eyes the problem is solved. I personally think that the technical possibilities within our digital photography era sometimes invite absurdities. (e.g. whale emerging from an asphalt road) technically incredibly impressive, but as a photograph...... I think that's kitsch of the highest order.
In addition, there is also the fact that once you know the trick, the special quality of the photo disappears. At least for me.

Mabel Amber wrote on Thursday 14 March 2019 at 13:07  | reply

Theo says "I agree with Elvira that the photo you are showing is also not very attractive to look at".

I think you are addressing me (Mabel Amber), Theo, because I was the one who made comments about the quality of Elvira's example photo (the writer of this article).

And furthermore, in general:

To be honest, I find Elvira's photo downright bad. When you write an article that claims to explain the concept of "Kitsch" in photography, then put up a *good* "kitsch photo". Hence my link to many very good "kitsch" photos on Pixabay.

Furthermore, I agree with Theo that photo editing is not something from the digital age. There were countless possibilities for influencing the quality and appearance of a film photo. I will mention:

Outside the darkroom:
1. choice of film
2. choice of filters (you had countless ones, with all kinds of effects! Very closely comparable to the filters now offered in editing programs)
3. multiple exposures
4. Creative flashing
5. For color photos: use daylight film for night photography and vice versa, use film for evening photography in daylight. You could also influence this by instructing the developing lab to switch the developing processes.
The results were not rarely very special and also particularly surprising. I can speak from experience because I experimented a great deal.

In the darkroom:
2. choice of developer
3. choice of developing time (be careful with this..)
4. choice of type of photographic paper
5. use of filters in the enlarger
6. dodging and burning
7. zone photography (that was a science in itself)
8. pseudosolarization (turning on the light when the photo was in the developer)
9. use of toners (toner bath after the wet developing process)

...and there were more processes that I cannot think of right now.

Finally: "kitsch" photos do not exist, it is a term with which people conveniently refer to a genre, in English one speaks of "eye candy", literally "candy for the eye", but even in that you have good and bad quality.

There are only good and bad photos.

So many people, so many opinions. Personally, I found it a refreshing blog, enjoyed it and learned from it again! Thanks Elvira!

@Mabel and Theo. Indeed, you can influence a lot with analogue photography. I look back on that era with pleasure. However, I think that back then fewer people had access to a darkroom than people now have access to a laptop or PC. The possibilities are now more extensive and easier to obtain. Besides, I wouldn't be able to conjure a whale up out of the asphalt with analogue photography just like that. Digitally, it works flawlessly and quickly.

martinphili wrote on Sunday 17 March 2019 at 07:48  | reply

I found another nice quote from someone who also took a photo now and then:
“I hate good taste. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a creative person” -Helmut Newton-
I think it fits this discussion.