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Photography is an art. And as with art, there is no "good" or "bad" art, only something that meets personal taste or not. Dismissing one form of art because of personal taste, is, well, weird.

Edit: Anselm Adams was a landscape photographer, a really good one. I think his work and portfolio is impressive without people in it. On the other hand, Henri Cartier-Bresson created an equally impressive catalogue of work with basically no landscapes in it. That alone proofs that both photographic styles are equally valid. As is architecture photography, and fankly, any other style.

How is having personal taste weird? It's not weird at all given all people have personal taste and all people dismiss things or promote things based off of their own preferences.

Additionally there is also the shared reality of human tastes and preferences. There is certainly art that a majority of humans find good and the majority of humans find bad. It makes sense to speak to this majority preference.

Personal taste isn't weird. Judging work not meeting that taste based said taste alone, well, that is weird.

Edit: Just a tid bit, coming from some experience in travel photography, taking pictures of people, when said people are the main subject, absolutely requires their permission. Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency. I'd add even after the fact, in case you shot a spontanous scene and the person is clearly identifyable. Working, even as an amateur, based on the rules of photo journalism is a good thing to do.

>Personal taste isn't weird. Judging work not meeting that taste based said taste alone, well, that is weird.

Why not. All judgement by individuals is made off of personal opinions. It's not weird at all. In fact your judgement of me here is also personal taste. I personally think judgement based off of personal taste is not weird at all.

>Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency.

I disagree. I have experience with travel photography too. I ask only when I want a close up portrait, otherwise I don't ask and I don't make a big deal out of it.

If the culture has a huge problem with it, then I may respect the culture to avoid confrontation, but if not, again, I don't go out of my way to ask as if it was a huge problem to begin with because it's not.

I believe this is a point of contention among street photographers. Some believe you should always ask permission, others believe that if you are in public you are fair game.

Also laws may vary depending upon where you are.

This is so true.

Another factor: when there are people in pictures, they're often looking at phones.

My Dad ( https://petermcgrath.me/#/people ) is a great enthusiast of "street photography." He doesn't sell his work, but it's more than a hobby for him--Garry Winograd was one of his graduate school instructors and he's been shooting actively since the late 1960s.

He says his big challenge in the last decade has been finding interesting shots of people when most in a crowd are looking down.

Your dad has a beautiful street gallery. Thanks for sharing!

As someone who loves doing street photography, I agree with all of this. It's not impossible to tell a story without people, but it's a whole lot harder.

> The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.

Most people won't notice or care either. In the thousands of street photos I've taken, I've had exactly one person give me trouble (it was a stupid situation to give me trouble too, it was literally crowd of people and he wasn't even in the center of frame) and maybe a few people notice and gesture a negative (which I respected). I've asked people to take their pictures, but as soon as you do it sorta ruins it IMO, but I'm also not particularly interested in portraiture.

Please tell me you are only talking about urban photography. Because there is more life in this world than just people, and if you honestly feel that nature photography without humans is apocalyptic, that is a really bleak outlook on the vast diversity of life and beauty in our world.

Replace people with living things. My argument still applies.

Even for nature photography people can be a part of it.

For nature though I typically expect a lot of animals not just landscapes, textures and macro shots of plants all the time.

I still partially disagree with the "must have people" the subject. There is a whole branch of nature photography that is for scientific purposes. Many of these are stunningly beautiful. As an example take a look at the work done Cornell Ornithology lab with crowd sourced observations of birds. Many of these observations come with pictures submitted to track some 10,000+ species of birds around our earth. Some of these species are near extinction or are extinct. Pictures of even the most common birds are uploaded and help scientists verify location and behavior of birds. The "best" pictures created are crowd rated and are quite beautiful. There is a protocol for rating these pictures by the crowd. See link below for further evidence.

https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home

EDIT: Added a more specific example of a beautiful vulnerable bird the Shoebill and an example of the ratings system.

https://ebird.org/species/shoebi1

I should generalize the argument with more nuance. Not that a "photo" must have "people".

More accurately an "album" must have "living things". So a collection of photos must contain photos (not all) that have some living thing in it. There are some cases where this rule of thumb doesn't apply but, in general, a good album follows this rule.

I believe the reason people keep arguing with you is that you keep saying "must" instead of "my preference is that...".

It has discussed in other comments as well, but you seem to only grudgingly acknowledge that other people's preferences are as valid as your own, and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed. It comes off as arrogant and disrespectful.

> I believe the reason people keep arguing with you is that you keep saying "must" instead of "my preference is that...".

No. The reason is because a lot of the people on this thread are also people who take these huge photo albums that are full of just random geometry and devoid of animals or people. As with 99% of humanity, people take negative opinions or criticism against them as a personal attack. That's just the way people are. People need to get defensive rather then face a possible reality that their hobby and personal works are just not good.

> and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed.

They don't have to be followed but they "must" be followed for the album to be "good" in the eyes of the general public. There is a shared reality here that exists outside of peoples individual preferences. Good books exist, good movies exist, but also Bad movies exist and horrible books exist that represent a sort of mass social group consensus on a topic. You either acknowledge that reality or you live in a delusional bubble.

I am saying this. For most of these photography albums taken by software engineers that are devoid of people and only contain inanimate objects, most honest people will think those photo albums are boring and not good in general. You can make make a point that I am wrong about this general consensus. That many people actually find those photo albums to be amazing.

But to call me arrogant and disrespectful? That's wrong. I respect everyone, but that does not preclude me from sharing my opinion however negative it is. I will not lie. "Must" is an appropriate all encompassing word here in expressing a general consensus on the topic I am addressing.

Additionally you should know that I have a lot of upvotes on the parent comment because people agree. I have downvotes on some of the branching threads from people who took it personally. Overall the evidence on this thread supports my thesis in that the general population agrees with me.

Would be really nice to have a downvote button for this one. The above is riddled with broad brush bigotry and chauvinism. This belief is hilarious in 2023, well during the selfie-camera epoch. People are definitely not going away from photography anytime soon. What a hostile overreaction.

There is a downvote button once you pass a certain number of karma points you can take your reactionary opinion and downvote people without consideration to nuance. I prefer a comment like this so I can explain myself.

I'm not referring to smart phone photos and Instagram feeds. This post more pertains to "professional" photography albums on people's blogs where the photo was taken by a mirrorless or DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses. A lot of software engineers have this "photography" hobby but the thing is their photography always has a particular style of being devoid of people.

Check it out, every once in a while you may encounter such a profile or blog of an engineer. Just look at his photography albums on his personal website. No people, usually.

If it isn't landscapes, you are going to see a near literal sea of faces in the of portfolios of most professional photographers. Why attack the search for art, beauty or interest in what you might find mundane? Since you mentioned it again, is your prejudice against software engineers self-hate, or a more distant loathing?

It's not an attack. Just an opinion. Just like you have an opinion different from mine.

You should not downvote someone for having a different opinion.

You're exaggerating this opinion by calling me prejudice against software engineers and using words like self hate. Again I just have an opinion.

Landscapes imo should not always exclude people. I often include people to illustrate scale. It doesn't have to be a sea of faces all the time, but a lot of photographers follow this idea of keeping their landscape photos pristine and devoid of anything with a person.

Seems like landscape plus someone wearing scarlet has long been cliche :-)

Perhaps the programmers you're talking about don't like people very much, and would prefer not to have them polluting our photos!

Or, to say the same thing much less cynically: as an introvert I use photography as a solitary activity in order to recharge - so I naturally gravitate towards people-free locations when I have the camera in hand. None of what you say is false, of course - but when I pick up the camera my goal isn't necessarily to produce the most meaningful or poignant image possible, nor even to produce something that necessarily resonates with anyone else.

Totally agree. If that's the goal then great. I'm an introvert myself and I completely relate.

But I do have a desire to produce great photos that meet my own standards of quality and including people is one of my personal standards.

If you've never tried such a thing, I recommend you try at least once to produce an album that includes a lot of photos interspersed with a good amount of people and portraits. Its definitely more uncomfortable to create such an album but personally, for me it enhances the album much more. Just a recommendation from one introvert to another.

Yeah, it's good to step outside the comfort zone sometimes. Most recently for me that was taking photos at a cycle event - trying to remember to pay attention to the background and framing even in the heat of the moment!

Repetition is helpful in discovering what we like about particular kinds-of picture and learning successful techniques.

Some public events explicitly provide a role for volunteer photography and policy for that role:

https://volunteer.parkrun.com/principles/photography-policy

Every week there will be a group of people running and jogging and walking around the same 5k parkrun courses. Every week is another opportunity to make pictures from a different position, or make different pictures from the same position, or perfect the same picture.

https://www.parkrun.com/

> It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.

I agree with just going for it when it comes to asking strangers for their portrait. If you’re friendly and confident (and know how to take rejection swiftly and just move on), you’ll have a 90%+ success rate. Having a weird old film camera bumps that up even more, in my experience. So does opening with a compliment (“oh wow I love your outfit”).

However, taking a portrait of someone without their consent in 2023 is just a dick move. This debate has been had so many times under so many angles that you just can’t claim ignorance anymore if you take yourself seriously as a photographer.

A great book I enjoyed recently is Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities.

Depending on where you are in the world and whether you obviously fit in within the cultural fabric or not, people might get very offended/aggressive about it (you deserved it), or not say anything but that doesn’t make you any less of a dick.

Just ask. It can be as simple as pointing to your camera and showing a thumbs up with a quizzical look waiting for a nod in busy situations, it’ll take a second. If the person is performing/selling/etc, buying something/leaving a tip beforehand will help a lot.

If asking scares you so much, that picture isn’t yours to take.

I promote both asking and just taking it.

Asking for a photo produces something different then just taking it.

Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about. It's such a minor thing.

It's true though that you don't want to start a fight, so use judgement on that but in terms of being a dick it's actually not a big deal.

> Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about.

I’ve met many such photographers when traveling, yep. They make things worse for all of us.

>They make things worse for all of us.

This is an exaggeration. 99.99 percent of the time nobody cares. Why? Because it's really not a huge deal.

99.99 percent of the time they don't know what you've done.

Me with my huge ass professional camera? They know and they don't care.

Apparently that is what you choose to believe.

There is a difference between being scared of taking photos of random strangers versus actually doing it. I would mark you as the former... you're just scared.

Nobody cares. At most they will be slightly annoyed, but ultimately they forget about it in a minute. A lot of people (like you) are just scared of this slight annoyance, your mind over blows it and your behavior becomes controlled by every small thought other people think of you.

Even in countries where it's not culturally appropriate. Often they're just annoyed because of culture, because they grew up and were taught that it's impolite to take pictures. They aren't in actuality annoyed because nothing really happened... and they forget about it quick. Stop being scared, and stop accusing me of choosing to believe things.

Again you have stated personal belief as if it were fact.

Some examples of the above (though in no way canonical):

  Bystander by Joel Meyerowitz

  Heads by DiCorcia

  Portraits by Richard Avedon

If you want Americana, then Stephen Shore.

You like people on photos, other people don't. End of story.

Whats' with the negativity? Its an individual (leisure) pursuit and you are not influenced in any way shape or form by what other people like to photograph.

If this kind of pseudo art photography isn’t already dead, AI models will finish it off shortly. There is no juice left in photography that is concerned with gear, geometric coincidence and photoshop.

It's dead already in the sense that you won't see this stuff published on the news or anything.

As a hobby though I don't think it will ever die. You'll see a lot of this stuff on personal blogs or websites. A lot of software engineers include a photography section on their site.