decay # 29 ~ get real pt. 2

Lemon, apple core, and peppers • click to embiggenWith just a few responses, yesterday's comments have generated - at least in my mind - enough fodder for a week's worth of topics. So, let us start with this one -

It seems that some have inferred from yesterday's entry that I think that the medium of painting has no relevance to nor offers any lessons for the medium of photography. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A couple recent cases in point -

1) As Craig Tanner correctly pointed out, my entire decay and disgust series intentionally pays more than a little homage to the Flemish Still Life Masters - painters, one and all.

2) Add to that my recent entry, man & nature # 101 ~ the most influential photog of the 20th century (who never made a photograph) which highlighted an article about the influence of a painter and his paintings upon the photographic world and several of its most prominent practitioners.

3) The good lord willing and the creek don't rise, I will be visiting Tuscany and the city of Florence in the near future where I will (gasp) be immersing myself in Renaissance Art and it's difficult for me to imagine that I won't learn something that I can bring to my picture making.

Let me also go on record, here and now, once and for all, and state that it would be foolhardy at best, disingenuous at worst, to even think that 2 mediums which share the exact same real estate - the 2-dimensional surface of a print / canvas - share no aesthetic or visual values.

However ... what really got me going about the statement(s) by "one of the world's foremost nature and wildlife photographers" was the word, "brushstrokes". Simply put, there are no brushstrokes used in either the making or display of photographs. None. Zip. Nada.

For purposes of this discussion let's disregard the whole question of what Art is and what it isn't (as per Paul the-resident-contrarian Maxim's advice) and focus on terminology and reference.

If "one of the world's foremost nature and wildlife photographers" had stated, using terminology and references specific to the medium of photography, that "blurred antelopes become" streaks of light and color smeared across several moments in time, I might have been less inclined to have reached such an elevated apoplectic state like the one I found myself in yesterday AM. That would be because my agitation stemmed - and still does - from the fact that the only compliment of high praise that so many photogs who come from the camera-club / photography-as-decoration side of the medium can give to a photograph is to say that it is "painterly", or, "it looks like a painting", or, how about, let's say, "it becomes a Sumi painting", or, "a Seurat come to life".

Praising a photograph because it resembles a painting brings to my mind this little bit of astute observation:

There aren’t twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don’t care. - Rudyard Kipling

IMO and to the point, here's one of photography's medium-specific characteristics that "one of the world's foremost nature and wildlife photographers" seems to be missing / not understanding / not caring about - photography's inherent and inimitable relationship with/to time.

That's a medium-specific relationship that in no small part helps define photography as a medium that is not like painting - a medium with its own specific identity, potentialities, capabilities, and characteristics. Medium specific potentialities, capabilities, and characteristics which, as practiced by some over the previous century or so, have pulled the medium of photography out from under the shadow of the medium of painting and enabled it to stand on its own 2 feet - no excuses, no apologies, and no comparisons to painting required, thank you very much.

Personally, I would think that it would be much more helpful, not to mention accurate, to reference the blurred antelopes relative to photography's ability (relative to its relationship with/to time) to illustrate things that the eye can not see. In this case, light and color smeared across seconds of time as opposed to say Edgerton's milk drops frozen in a fraction of a second in time. And, I don't know why, but I feel compelled to state that neither of these medium specific capabilities have absolutely anything to do with "brushstrokes".

Some may consider it a personal failing on my part, but I just can not get by the notion - and I emphatically make no apologies for it - that doling out photography-that-looks-like-painting compliments and aspirations is little more than intellectual laziness / ignorance regarding the medium's unique intrinsic potentialities, capabilities, and characteristics.

IMO, when that lack of intellectual rigor is dispensed by "masters" of the game to students of the game, a very real dumbing-down of the medium's unique intrinsic potentialities, capabilities, and characteristics takes place. And that dumbing down affects both the student's ability to explore and understand the medium's uniqueness both in their picture making and their picture viewing. In my mind, that is not a good thing.

But, on the other hand, I understand that it is much easier to dole out the photography-painting comparos than it is to wrap one's mind around this:

What Photography means to me: I believe in doubt as an essential tool for an effective search of that which, if it may not be called truth, of truth may be a fair approximation. A search that brings about a continuous change of perspective and that transforms the moment, by nature weak and fragile, into an extraordinary building element of a conscious existence. The change and the revolution of thought, of the basic view of life, its continuous refinement, its incessant updating and growth in values, are indelebly fixed in a photographic image. A fragile, almost intangible, support, which shyly confronts the power of the flow of time, representing for all time that which shall never be for all time: the moment.

A revolutionary technique of expression because it relates to time in an absolutely special way; the image, with its multiple meanings, can only be found if it exists in the phographer before it is fixed on film and must then be reconquered when it becomes an image to look at. A search within a search, a continuous collection of moments for the moment which in the photographic moment will be fixed forever. - Kamir

On the other hand, I really believe that it is worth both the time and the effort that it might require to get real about photography's inherent and inimitable relationship with/to time.

Comments

[Mauro Thon Giudici]

The Photographer you are confronting is from a totally different school of aesthetics. He is out to find an audience and adapting to get it. Ecology is down so lets jump on painting. Funny how the blur comes in handy speaking of high cost workshops. Just to stay on the hilarious side I have not exactly understood what was the steadiness of taking pictures from a boat on a well agitated sea (as Antartica) on a costly workshop. Now I got it. It is to make art stupid me. Can get back to take blurred pictures of the water in my wc an pretend it is a well brushstroked whale :-D