Scenic Fatigue
In this month’s Sunday Morning Photographer column Mike Johnston looks at the subject of prettiness in photography.
“I don’t mean to look down my nose at the work of amateur photographers, or to imply that I don’t like looking at pictures. On the contrary, some of the amateur work I see is excellent, and occasionally remarkable. And I have a protean appetite for looking at photographs. It’s just that I tend to look at pictures actively - I tend to seek the intelligence behind them, the coherence between one photographer’s different pictures, the purpose and meaning of what I’m looking at. And this is where the fatigue comes from?because after a while, it starts to become clear to me that what the majority of people are chiefly seeking is simply prettiness.”