I teach Communication studies at California State University, San Bernardino, and I take apart the word express to help my students understand the deeper meanings buried in the word. My students learn about the communication process both for personal and commercial purposes, and the word express helps them understand more clearly the goals and concerns in the profession of communications.

Express is comprised of the Latin present active exprimō, present infinitive exprimere, perfect active expressī, supine expressum or, simply, ex meaning “out,” and press, to press out. Express, therefore, means one’s attempt to press out from within and leave an impression on the mind of one’s audience, whether that’s one person or millions. It’s our goal to implant an idea, a message, a concept into the mind of our audience.

Express, therefore, means one’s attempt to press out from within and leave an impression on the mind of one’s audience, whether that’s one person or millions. It’s our goal to implant an idea, a message, a concept into the mind of our audience.

In the field of Communications the successful impression on the minds of others can translate into huge paychecks. Advertisers make fortunes leaving impressions on the minds of their audiences: drink this sugary substance because it will make you feel happy, purchase this means of transportation because it will make you “look good and hip.”

In fine art photography, impressing on the mind of one’s audience means conveying the photographer’s thoughts and feelings about a subject. I learned this from my principal life teacher, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a westerner by birth, but a convert to the religion: we humans are comprised of these two components, he taught. It’s the way we happen. Our thoughts and feelings are parents of our deeds, he said. His goal was to awaken a person so that he or she could see that the world they live in was created by their own actions, thoughts and feelings. This understanding, I believe, is really important in its application to fine art photography.

When we look at a masterpiece, we see the thoughts and feelings of the artist captured in a photo, be it black and white, which is closer to the essence of things, or in color. The manipulation of light, the control of it by the photographer, and how it fans out across the subject, when done perfectly, can convey meanings far beyond mere words.

Examples of this can be seen when we look at the photography of Sebastião Salgado, who, in my opinion, is one of the greatest living black and white photographers. But more about him later.

Edward Weston, 1952
© Lou Jacobs Jr.

First, let’s take a look at the methods of the masters of old for creating fine art photographs and compare their methods to the fine art artists in this medium today. Lou Jacobs, who has written some forty books on photography, and countless articles for a host of magazines, described to me how the twentieth century photography giant Edward Weston used a military-devised contact printer, a simple box with dozens of lights beneath a piece of frosted glass, in the printing of his images. We were in his home near Palm Springs, California, admiring a portrait Jacobs had taken of Weston. Weston was seated near the great photographer’s dining room table in his home in the Carmel Valley. The portrait was done with natural light, meaning no flash, as Weston was seated near a window, and the soft light filtering through the window illuminated the photographer with a soft glow.

Jacobs told me that if Weston’s finished print was to be 8×10 inches Weston used a negative of the same size, placed light sensitive paper on the top of the negative which had been placed on top of the glass and pressed the lid down so there was no longer a gap between the negative and paper, and exposed the print to the light, creating a reverse image of the negative. That which was dark became light on the paper, and that which was light, or clear, on the negative burned to black. Shades of gray became shades of gray in the print.

Ansel Adams taught that there were ten shades of gray, from pure black to pure white that should occur in a final black and white photograph. He was a master at making great prints with such a varied tonal structure. Of course, so was Weston, whether it was of Point Lobos, near his home where Jacobs used to visit him in the fifties, or Georgia O’Keefe, or seashells, or nudes. The manipulation of light through those switchers in his light box empowered him to control the creation of his black and white masterpieces. Such were the technological tools used by Weston and Adams and others.

These photographers used contact printers that gave them sharp, fine-detailed images, but the turning off and on of individual lights, or banks of lights, did not give them overly fine controls for their creative expression. Obviously, they were fine art artists and had mastered the medium of their day. Just go online and see some of their work, or better yet go to a gallery or art museum where their work is displayed, remembering that viewing their work in person is infinitely better than any computer screen-generated image.

Retired U.S. Navy photographer and commercial photographer Frank Peele, of Redlands, California, recalled using one of these types of printers when he served in the Navy. “The World War II-vintage 10×20 aerial film contact printer (was) known generically as an argon printer, so named because the bulbs were (supposedly) argon lamps, and their purple light supported the possibility. They were small lamps, spaced close together, at least forty in number, each one controlled by a toggle switch. Other toggles turned the lamps on and off in banks, for wide-area control of print density… the printer was also made in a 10×10 version… that could be the version used by Weston.”

…fine art photographers blend their thoughts and feelings consciously in the creation of their final output, just as did Weston and Adams and the photographers of yesteryear.

The modern photographer can use digital-image manipulation software like Adobe® Photoshop® and paint with lightness and darkness, as well as hue, color and saturation. The artist can do this in color printmaking, or black and white. In black and white color conversions, master digital photographer John Paul Caponigro teaches that the manipulation of hue and saturation before the conversion creates the opportunity for greater tonal changes. Greens that become strong reds before the conversion can offer stronger blacks, or grays, or tonal contrast in the final black and white print.

The artist today has far more options than did Weston and Adams, and infinite more control, down to the individual pixel if need be. When you consider that today’s pixel-empowered photographer can purchase a camera with twenty million to sixty million pixels, that’s a lot of options.

But let’s return to my theme: fine art photographers blend their thoughts and feelings consciously in the creation of their final output, just as did Weston and Adams and the photographers of yesteryear. I believe it is an important distinction and the term fine art artists can never apply to those of us who grab our cell phones and use their built in camera to capture a moment in time.

I was reminded of this as I watched a woman the other evening during a church service. She illustrated this idea perfectly, even though she didn’t realize it. I watched as she swayed with the music and singing and then dug into her purse and whipped out her cell phone and began shooting away. She wasn’t creating fine art, but she was attempting to capture her feelings. She was emotionally driven by the moment, her feeling component overdriving her thought process — I say that because there were signs about the hall that declared “no photography during the service.” She ignored the signs and as she clicked away in an attempt to capture the feelings that dominated her during the service. She was not practicing fine art photography, and I don’t believe she would have claimed she was.

Fine art photographers, however, are not concerned with capturing Aunt Martha and the grandkids, or the Grand Canyon, or the emotional experience of a church service, but expressing their thoughts and feelings about vistas, people, and events. It’s a different ballgame for them, one where they seek infinite possibilities in the expression of their view.

Sometimes they have a worldview that dominates their thinking, and they insert that worldview in their image with unspoken editorial comment. Other photographers manage to get out of the way of the projection of their worldview onto their work, and let the scene speak for itself. Take Salgado: he is a man on a mission, exposing man’s inhumanity to humanity but he does so creating masterpieces of fine art, haunting and evocative works about very unbeautiful, unbelievably unjust and inhumane treatment of men and women by other men and women.

…whether we are speaking of the digital photographer, or the film giants of previous generations… the ultimate goal remains the same — the use of photography to express one’s thoughts and feelings about the scene before the lens.

His images capture injustice, but beautifully. Fine art instincts dominate his creations. His thoughts and feelings about the happening before his lens are captured in such a way as to leave a strong, permanent impression on the mind of his audience. (It’s good to recall that he reported that he began his professional life as an economist with the World Bank, with a goal of helping people. He said he came to the conclusion he could do more to make a difference in the world with a camera.) I for one am glad he made the professional decision to lay down his economic tools and replace them with a camera.

In his kind of photography, there is risk-taking, artistic judgment, and the expressive creative process as he captures the scene before his lens. And, the more purely he does it, the rawer the feelings and thoughts he reveals, he expresses, the stronger and more universal his impact, as this rawness hits our own nerves, our thoughts and feelings, changing us forever in our consideration of the inhumanity he exposes.

As noted before, today’s photographers create differently if they work in digital photography. With Adobe® Photoshop®, for example, they can simply create a blank layer on top of the background image and change the blend mode of that new layer, resulting in the downward flow of an Adobe-created algorithm onto the layer below it. They can modify the blend mode, for example, to “overlay,” which allows them to digitally “paint” with black and white light, adding or subtracting luminosity or darkness to an image, shaping, molding emphasis, deleting or reducing it as need be.

They can and do add more blank layers for hue adjustments, or saturation, or color, and paint on each layer. They can even de-saturate an area on a saturation layer by painting with black and white, or the absence of color, or add saturation to an area by painting with a bright, vivid color. And when done, they merge their layers up, so that they don’t loose the ability to come back later and make further changes.

One of the most powerful digital tools is the luminosity mask for adding luminance to the mid-tones to lightest areas in an image, greatly expanding the dynamic range of photographs. It’s like a light box used by Weston and Adams, but with millions of bulbs that selectively choose which pixels the modern photographer wants to add brightness to.

The control available to the modern photographer is virtually infinite because each layer can be altered in its opacity, extending the reach of today’s fine artist.

But whether we are speaking of the digital photographer, or the film giants of previous generations like Salgado, Weston or Adams, the ultimate goal remains the same — the use of photography to express one’s thoughts and feelings about the scene before the lens. And the mastery of the tools must precede the conscious choice of subject and ground before making the exposure and contemplating its manipulation in the darkroom of the film photographer or the “Lightroom” of the digital photographer.