first...a IM conversation between me and another photographer on the topic if whether his photo was worthy of even "his" adoration.
me: it reaches the benchmark of "a moment in time"...a true moment....the pic is above par on a very hard scale...it could be a (movie) still, but the the best part is that it looks like the photog is transparent in the process....shit..its her, its the pic..its the booze.....you name it.
him: thank you!
him: thank you for getting it
him: here's what's going up on my blog:
him: "Sometimes the story in a photo isn't the story you saw at all, but it's just so achingly beautiful the fake story wins."
me: yes....and that is where photography becomes art....when the story can be made up.
A photo makes you wonder....art makes you think.
end conversation.....
since picking up this photography hobby AND diving right in....it seems most conversations in and around the "photography" community are about "what doesn't work" in a particular photograph. there are many online communities out there, such as flickr, that have thousands of "groups" you can join and readily have your work torn apart by what some call "F"Tards (fu@k tards).
i thought golf was an elitest hobby...it holds nothing to photography....and i've been known to go elitest myself....i have certainly made my fair share of comments in the open groups about how a photo could be improved upon.
it made me think about another friends blog recently about how we have been trained by the computer GUI to just negotiate rather than analyze....here is the intro section of the blog.
"The other day I was reading an article by Sherry Turkle about the evolution of the GUI and how the desktop simulation “permits” a user to stay on the computer's surface, never diving below the picture to work with its innards. From this, Turkle says, we learned to "negotiate rather than analyze."
i seriously have obsessed over this assertion, not because i don't understand, but because it finally put into words what i have been stewing over for years but did not have the ability to articulate it effectively.
hense, we have replaced thought with technology, imagination with HDR(high dynamic range..super detailed photos). in these photogroups critiques are mostly about technique, technical abilities, detail (too much, not enough), etc.
what has happened to the damn "feeling" in anything.....in us?
i think any great piece of art, whether its a photo, a painting, a building design, the cut of your underwear, or the presentation of a dinner plate on a night out....will speak to you before you do anything with or around it....it will cause you to "think".
art in all its forms is less about the technique and much more about the feeling it pushes outwardly. thats the creative process as i see it. we must not look to qualify anything as art beyond our own gut feeling. flaws are natural, art and creativity are natural and are imperfect in essense. the techno-crats have forgotten this, but it does not mean we must go along. do not take this as these communities are not worthwhile....just like in everything in life, there is some gold in there, you just need to be willing to look for it, or better yet...allow it to find you.
