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by Joseph T Sinclair

Photographs lend themselves well to abstractions; that is, you can create an abstract work of art using a photograph and photographic techniques. Let’s look at a few ways you can create abstraction photographs:

• Photograph things that show a recognizable abstraction.

• Photograph things that show an unrecognizable abstraction.

• Photograph abstractions, such as other abstract works of art.

• Make an abstraction photograph using a specific art filter (e.g., impressionist, Van Gogh, etc).

• Use numerous photo editing filters to make an abstraction photograph.

• Use Photoshop processes to make an abstraction photograph.

• Use numerous photographs (collage) to make one abstraction photograph.

• Use AI.

These are enough ideas to get you started. But there’s no limitation on the techniques you can use to make abstract art in photography.

Abstraction

What’s the definition of abstraction for the purposes of this article? It’s simply abstracting something that’s an unreal image from something that’s real. Or creating something from scratch that’s unreal. And it can have a beauty all its own. For instance, an abstract painting is an artists’ abstraction of a visual display from their own thoughts, imagination, or dreams. In this article, the focus is on abstracting a photograph from a recognizable image (photograph) or work of art.

Recognizable Abstraction

You can easily photograph almost anything in a way that shows it as an abstraction. But the abstraction can be recognized by the viewer. This is a popular and effective way to use abstraction as an artistic tool.

Unrecognizable Abstraction

You can also easily photograph almost anything in a way that shows it as an abstraction, but one that a viewer cannot recognize. This is also a popular way to use abstraction as an artistic tool.

Other Abstract Art

You can photograph other abstract art to achieve an abstraction. If you simply copy a work of abstract art, there’s often not much creativity involved. Nonetheless, works of art come in all shapes and configurations. If you shoot an abstract work of art in an unusual way or shoot only part of an abstract work of art, you can create something fresh.

Filter

You can use a filter to make a photograph abstraction. For instance, there are filters to make your photograph look like a Van Gogh or numerous other artists. This is an easy and fun way to make abstraction. And such abstractions can be very attractive and worthy of printing for use or for sale.

Numerous Filters

You aren’t limited to using only one filter to manipulate a photograph. You can run a photograph through numerous filters to get a very creative abstraction photograph.

Photoshop

Photoshop has lots of processes for turning photographs into abstract photographs. Let you imagination run loose.

Collage

You can combine photographs to get an abstract photograph. Typically, a physical collage can contain almost anything physical such as fabrics, newsprint, pieces of glass or wood, artistic painting, etc. The end result is an abstract work of art. Likewise, you can do the same with multiple photographs. Keep in mind that photographs can be opaque (normal) or have a degree of transparency (rendered in Photoshop) that enables a wide range of creativity.

AI

AI is the newest way to make abstractions. You feed words into an AI generator and get a result. In other words, you play around with words instead of with Photoshop digital tools.

Disease

The trouble with most of these techniques is that you can play around with them forever. It becomes an addiction-like disease. You lose all sense of time, reality, and family. The only cure is an ice-cold bath and a dozen sessions of psychiatric therapy.

Leftovers

Most of us take a lot of photographs. Then we pick out the good ones and post them someplace digitally or print them. But the ratio is typically large. At least for me it is. I get one good (artistic) photo out of about 300 shots or more.

It is in reviewing all the discards that you may find some abstraction potential. A photograph that isn’t traditionally attractive may have some unique quality making it ideal for an abstraction. Keep that in mind as you look over your photographs.

Communication

Clearly, normal photographs communicate much about ourselves. And isn’t that the whole point of taking photographs: expressing ourselves. But abstractions go a step beyond normal communication. They better communicate phenomena not to be found in normal photographs—phenomena such as dreams, unnatural visions, and elemental sensitivity. Indeed, abstractions are us.

by Joseph T Sinclair

To understand this article you must first read White?. I would add a sentence to these sentences from White?:

This [selling an all-white photograph] is going to be a hard sell, however, unless you attach some BS to it to make it valuable. You have an explanation to write and the title to play with.

The explanation takes a little work but is not too difficult. Simply research on Google what other artists have said about their all-white paintings and distill to a similar line of compelling BS.

Titles are more difficult. They take some ingenuity and cultural awareness. But an all-white painting doesn’t have much value without evocative title words.

Add the following sentence:

You can use AI to generate the BS you need for an explanation and for creating a compelling title as well. AI does this task for you with surprising competency.

My friend Tim actually did the AI generation below.

I turned the problem of promoting and selling your work over to ChatGPT.  Here’s the prompt I wrote.

I have made an all-white photo that is 4 X 8 feet mounted on plywood, and framed. I hope to sell it for $20,000.00 Write a promotional announcement for the sale justifying the existence of the photo as a work of art and defending the $20,000 price tag as eminently reasonable.

The response is attached.  I thought it was quite good.  I get 10% if you use it. 🙂
Tim

Here is the AI response to Tim’s AI prompt:

If this is your first introduction to AI, you should be amazed. If you’re familiar with AI, you should be impressed too. But ChatGPT is not the only AI generator that’s free to use. Here are several with which you can experiment:

DALL-E 2 (https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2)

Microsoft (https://www.bing.com/images/create?)

Adobe (https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html)

by Joseph T Sinclair

There has been a long-lasting fad of all-white paintings going back many years. These paintings are typically 4 ft x 8 ft or larger. They’re all white. You can find them in some museum collections regardless of the size or prestige of a particular museum. If you want to buy one, they range in price from a few hundred dollars to $30,000.

Fortunately, this fad has come to photography. Not long ago in the Napa Valley, I saw a very large all-white photograph. So, now photographers can take part in this lucrative image industry. The question is, how do you want to do this? Ironically, it may be that you are better off painting such a non-image rather than photographing it.

For example, if you are to make a 4 ft x 8 ft photograph all white, you need to find a clean white flat surface large enough to photograph (or perhaps create it in Photoshop). A metal print that size is going to cost you about $1,200. Or a paper print is going to cost a lot of money too, and you’ll have to mount it on a very large mounting board. Then you’ll need to frame it and perhaps even put glass over it. That pretty quickly adds up to hundreds of dollars of cost. That’s why I say, why not paint it instead? Here are the steps to do so:

• Buy a 4 ft x 8 ft panel of half-inch plywood with a layer of paper on one side. This is a standard lumber item.
• Buy a small can of latex glossy white paint.
• Rent a paint sprayer.
• Spray-paint the panel white on the paper side. (If you use a brush, viewers will see it’s not a photograph.)
• Take 3/4 inch by 2-inch wood molding painted white (or gray) and attach it all around the panel for a frame.
• Attach some wiring on the back for hanging.
• Sell for up to $30,000.

This is one of the rare artistic cases where painting is easier and less expensive than taking a photograph.

This is going to be a hard sell, however, unless you attach some BS to it to make it valuable. You have an explanation to write and the title to play with.

The explanation takes a little work but is not too difficult. Simply research on Google what other artists have said about their all-white paintings and distill to a similar line of compelling BS.

Titles are more difficult. They take some ingenuity and cultural awareness. But an all-white painting doesn’t have much value without evocative title words. Here are a few suggestions:

Pallor of the Matrix

Nuclear Landscape

Cache of Enlightenment

Samantha’s Anguish

Zachery’s Clean Soul

Cloud Number 17

(I’m sure you can do better than I have.)

There you have it! An easy way to cash in on this long-standing trend. This is the easiest fine art you’ll ever create. But a good title that is currently very trendy will take a lot of reflection. It might be something you want to refer to a focus group. This fine artwork lends itself to easy scaling. (Again, an observation based on a Napa Valley photograph exhibit.) For instance, you can put a thin line across the panel (presumably at the Phi grid line), and the painting becomes a whole different work of art.

Or you can put a thick line, preferably blurry, across the painting in the same way to create an additional great work of fine art. Etc.

Why work hard when you don’t have to? Be forewarned, however, that if you proceed as I have outlined, your spouse and your friends, relatives, and neighbors may think you’re something of a slacker. They may even call you heinous names. But all great artists have endured such accusations, and you should not let that bother you. It’s enough that museum curators and art gallery managers everywhere will applaud your vacuous work. So, the hell with your own people’s scurrilous denunciations.

by Joseph T Sinclair

I have seen plenty of photographs that have been so overbaked in post processing that that they have an otherworldly or fantasy quality to them. Personally, I don’t like such photographs, but they seem to have some popularity with the general public.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with AI photograph generators. It’s my impression that many AI photographs have such qualities.

Another common AI photograph quality is lack of definition. There seem to be too many pieces of the photograph out of focus. Then too, many AI photographs are just botched up (literally). Finally, many AI photographs just don’t look right.

Nevertheless, in some cases the AI generated photographs look real. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell that they are not traditional photographs.

The bottom line is that you need to play around with words and make endless experimental runs using different words with the generator to craft the photograph you want. But maybe it’s just easier and more productive to go out and take the picture.

That said, my experience is just a one-off. You need to experiment yourself with AI to see what it can do for you. It’s not going to go away. And in 5 years it will work much better than it does now.

First, you need to distinguish between AI assisted post processing and AI generated photographs. AI assistance is present in many photograph editors now, and it makes the normal thing you do easier and faster.

An AI photograph (image) generator, in contrast, creates a photograph from words you enter into the generator. You process the resulting photograph by changing the words and re-running the AI generator to see what you’ve got until you’ve got what you want. There are numerous AI photograph generators. Try one.

DALL-E 2 (https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2)

Microsoft (https://www.bing.com/images/create?)

Adobe (https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html)

See what you think. AI generated photographs may be adequate for many situations. But in my opinion, AI generation is currently not useable for aesthetic, realistic, color photographs; that is, the type of photographs that most of us strive for.

Nonetheless, AI generation can be useful for turning photographs into impressionist art or abstract art and for comparable processes.

AI is the new parlor game
I found myself with three other retired people after dinner. They all had their noses in their phones. They were making AI images, AI poetry, AI songs, and AI videos and then presenting the results to each other. The results were not particularly appealing, in fact boooring. Rudely, I dozed off until my spouse kicked me awake, and I had to pay polite attention. Of course, you know if AI is already a parlor game that it’s also well entrenched in internet platforms. YouTube, I’m guessing, has more AI video than the rest of the digital world combined.

Finally, you need to understand the combination of AI assisted post processing and AI generated images. Software such as Adobe’s Firefly incorporated into Photoshop (beta – moderate learning curve) enables you to easily apply complex processes to your photographs but to add AI imaging as well. In any case, this is a path to endless fiddling around.

Not only is this powerful digital technology but apparently Adobe is doubling the price of Photoshop (or maybe there will be two versions of Photoshop, one without AI generation).

AI is a technique for which you need to know the capabilities and limitations to determine how you might use it. Maybe a parlor game after dinner is the avenue to knowledge after all?