 What is good photography? Is somebody like William Eggleston a good photographer? Out of everybody who I know, he is probably the most divisive photographer. Either you think his work is imaginative and mind-blowingly good, or it's complete twaddle. How do you define a great photograph? Is it wonderful technical skills that these camera gymnastics that you can put yourself through? Or is it about this wonderfully beautiful aesthetic that puts you in mind of some sort of wonderfully calming scene? Or does the photograph have to have gravitas? Does it have to reach out and move you in a way that you never expected and shake your ideas to the very foundation? How's it? Rather than using William Eggleston, I thought today we're going to get to somebody who I've been meaning to cover for ages, and this is Fred Herzog. I think he's a great example of this, because while his photographs have some similarity with William Eggleston, so much as their kind of everyday objects, he's not quite as divisive. We can actually focus on the question at hand, rather than if this guy is completely overrated or not. Let's look at that first point, this idea of technique, that a photograph must be technically perfect to be great. And there's a really good example of this. I'm going to hold up the books and I will put up proper images on screen for you. I'm going to lean over the top of it. This is a photograph called Man with Bandage, and in this photograph there are a heap of things that are wrong. The guy himself is looking out of the short side of the frame, his arm is chopped off, the red post box is kind of in a really dominant place, so it all competes against each other. And I think if you were to hold this up to one of these strokey beard types and say, look at this amazingly great photograph, and this photograph is revered in many circles, they would sit there and pick it apart and say, no, but this is wrong, and that's wrong, and what have you. And forgetting that there's a deeper purpose to photographs than simply being a checkbox exercise. Throughout Fred Herzog's photography, there is a certain aesthetic. Now, an aesthetic for a lot of people these days, I think has become this idea of like, if you wouldn't put this photograph up on the wall, so for example, if it's not wall worthy, which I think is, let's use that as a phrase, a copter as a new phrase, that somehow the photograph is not great. I wouldn't necessarily put any of Fred Herzog's photographs up on the wall if I didn't know that they were by Fred Herzog, right, because they don't fit my own particular aesthetic. However, this is getting into a point where we all start seeing what is at the true heart of what constitutes a great photograph, and it's the impact that it has on ourselves, on the viewer. And we'll come back to that point later on, because it's an extremely important one. To see more content like this kind of video, then hit the subscribe button below, because that way YouTube will take that as a sign that you like to see episodes and videos about the Y photography, and that's what I produce here. And there are other channels that also produce very similar content. And when you hit that subscribe button, then YouTube takes out a sign that you like this and that they will start showing you more this kind of content. So it's a win-win. Does a photograph need to be powerful? Does it need to have impact and meaning and depth to be a great image? I don't think it does. I think that idea is at odds with a lot of things, because there are many, a great many photographs that I particularly enjoy, and many other people do, that don't have any greater purpose or meaning than simply being a photograph that in some way pleases the viewer. Who ultimately decides if a photograph is great or if it's, well, rubbish? It is the viewer. The viewer is the person who decides. Not some learned professor of photography who has written a weighty tome about photographs and has devoted their entire life to to studying their complexity and their their meaning and their intrigue, right? It's not up to them to say that this is a great photograph. It's up to you, the viewer, me, the viewer. The photographer has no say in this. And understand that point, we cannot as photographers decide if we are going to create great photographs. What we think is great may leave other people completely cold. We may produce a mediocre photograph or even an awful photograph. And then people will go, or somebody may look at it and go, that photograph, I don't know why, but it speaks to me. It has reached out and it has grabbed my attention and it has spoken to me in a way I cannot explain. So for them, that photograph is great. And that's the beauty of all of this is that we can, irrespective of our actual skill levels, create great photographs. It just so happens that some of these, you know, there was great photographs, if you want to call them that, you know, the more traditionally accepted things have just spoken to a lot of people. And then there's also a lot of people who think they're great just because they've been told they're great. But if you create a photograph that reaches somebody, that touches somebody, then you've created something that's great. And I think that's wonderful. It's marvelous. Don't let the pursuit of greatness, though, be your goal in photography. You don't want to be, you don't want to be a great photographer because it is a complete, it's, you can't do it. It's an unattainable goal because you cannot influence how people are going to interpret your photographs. You can give them guidelines. Sure, we talked about that previously. But ultimately, whether or not a photograph has succeeded, lies in the eye of the beholder to paraphrase something else. It would be interesting to see what you think about William Eggleston, if you're not familiar with his photography. So I'm going to link to a video right here, where you can go and check out the in-depth video that I put together on him. I would be great to see what you think. This book by Fred Herzog is absolutely wonderful. And it's been a shame that it's been taken so long to get featured on the channel here. As always, I've always linked to the books below in the description. So if you don't want to go and check them out, I would hardly recommend that you go and pick up a copy. It's always worth looking at these photographs in a physical form rather than on a screen. Because not only do you get to hold something tangible, and I think there's a real beauty to holding a nice, meaty, weighty book, but also you get to see the images signed by Sun, how they interact with each other. And that's so important when you are looking at photographs and getting the full flavour of them.