Ben Harvey - but is it art?

Ben Harvey - but is it art?

Quite a lot of ideas for this blog are the result of almost-throwaway remarks by others in the EPZ galleries. A while back, one poster said he was aiming for a fine art architectural study, and cited Ben Harvey as the influence. Now, I won’t go as far as saying that when I hear the term ‘fine art’ I reach for my revolver, it does make me very wary indeed.. It seems to be presumptuous for any photographer to claim that what they do is an art, rather than a craft. But I've finally got round to watching Ben Harvey's video of how he edits his architectural images.

It’s rather changed my mind. It is an incredibly complex way of making a picture, and clearly very, very effective. Near the start of the video, Harvey sketches the way he works with a pencil and ruler - and he is obviously either a trained artist or draughtsman, judging from the way that he created an easy and accurate perspective drawing. The way that he filled in shadows with shading and cross-hatching suggests great familiarity both with the concepts of light and shade, and their representation in pencil.

In Photoshop, he uses multiple layers and selections, and - crucially - he carefully adds and adjusts shadow and light in exactly the same way as he would if he was using a pencil or paintbrush instead of a camera, except that it may actually take longer to make the selections in Photoshop...

I don't want to discourage creative editing, but I would suggest that Ben Harvey starts with an absolutely excellent image, and works it patiently and in extreme detail. At the end of the video, he asks for any suggestions of plugins that will do the work, so that he can have his life back... A subsequent video deals with a relatively cheap plugin – but note that it still requires the layers and selective choice of areas to apply effects to…

What he does is definitely art: he is drawing in the light that he wants, while most of us look for the right light, or wait for it. I know that some darkroom workers go to extreme lengths to draw the image they want from their negatives (Ansel Adams's 'Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico' is a classic example), but the fact that once the work is done, a digital image can be printed repeatedly means that a far greater investment of time in a single image may be worthwhile. Together with the use of Layers, to allow each aspect of the processing to be refined later, the game has changed, and radically.

I think that I am probably too old to learn and apply such meticulous processing (given that I like a more immediate approach to things), but I thoroughly admire anyone who has the patience and the vision to do what Ben Harvey does! If extreme editing interests you, the videos that I watched will fascinate you: and you may be moved to go looking for B&W Artisan…