Practical Aesthetics for the Art Photographer: Meta-Texture

OK. The first thing you want to know: is what is this 'meta-texture' business? It's a word I coined to distinguish between the texture of a work of art that comes from the technique of the artist (such as brush strokes or film grain) as opposed to the visual texture of the object itself (such as wood grain or feathers). The next thing you want to know is: why this is of any conceivable importance to you as a photographer? The purpose of the rest of this essay is to convince you that it is.

Photography has been with us for the better part of two hundred years. Photography straddles the line between technology and art. A photograph can serve to document before and after for dental work or it can hang in a gallery of fine art. While many serious photographers used the early camera to do art during the 1800s, their work was largely looked down upon as being the poor relation of the "real" art of painting. Such photographers mostly strove to achieve a painterly, or atmospheric, look to their work...

Fig 1. Mariana by Julia Margaret Cameron (scan courtesy of Masters of Photography)

...or achieved it without striving thanks to serendipitous equipment limitations...

Fig 1. Snapshot, Paris, Alfred Stieglitz (scan courtesy of Masters of Photography)

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