The modern camera is an extremely precise machine that in conjunction with either modern photographic film or photosensitive digital chips is capable of producing with astounding accuracy, detail and authenticity, images we can only define as “photographic”. Thus anyone can create a photographic image. However, a thorough understanding of one’s equipment, technique, and one’s preferred recording medium, be it film or digital, allows the knowledgeable photographer without the aid of digital manipulation, to produce in camera, imagery not immediately perceived as photographic, thereby freeing himself from the tyranny of the tangible visual facts before him and the limitation of his medium. Once liberated from this tyranny of texture, substance, form and quotidian thought and perspectives, tangible visual facts can be rendered as something intangible to produce images that go beyond the subject.
B&W photograph. The story is told that Edward Steichen (co-founder along with Alfred Stieglitz of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession) as an experiment, once over a period of many months made a series of over 1000 exposures of a simple white cup & saucer using as many different lighting configurations in an attempt to produce and interesting image of a simple object that would exhibit the entire tonal range from deepest black to whitest white. I found the idea intriguing as it challenged my lifelong belief that virtually any subject, no matter how drab or seemingly uninteresting, can be photographed to produce an attractive image. So one afternoon I spent a few hours playing with different lighting configurations making a series of exposures. One studio strobe was used with a reflective baffle in the light path to cast some of the light onto the white wall of the studio in which it was shot. Unfortunately none of Steichen's "Cup & Saucer" images exist today. I like to think this is how one of them may have looked.