ku # 707 ~ surprise vs going the distance

Erratic top growth and detritus • click to embiggenPursuant to yesterday's entry about the utilization and organization of the flat 2D surface of the print, to include ideas and concepts about visual language, one could rightfully conclude that what appears on the surface of the print constitutes, in no small way, most of the purely decorative qualities of the print.

Color, shapes, spatial relationships/tension, tonality, and the like are what catches the eye. Sometimes they delight / soothe / comfort the eye and sometimes they irritate / agitate / confuse or otherwise unsettle it. And, dependent upon a viewer's tastes, preferences, mood, and the like (or any given combination thereof), a picture may be deemed to be visually involving or not.

It is also interesting to note that any particular picture that is deemed to be un-involving upon first viewing may, with a change in any of the aforementioned variables, be deemed, upon further and/or repeated viewing, to be interesting to the eye. Some pictures become more so upon repeated viewings. Others just tend to fade away.

Keep in mind here, that we are talking about the purely 2D surface characteristics of the print that are independent of the print's referent - the thing depicted.

I mentioned in yesterday's entry that these 2D qualities to be seen on a print are, in the photography world at large, one of the least understood / recognized qualities of a print. IMO, the reason for that is quite simple - most people on the planet, to include the overwhelming majority of picture makers, view pictures in much the same manner as Szarkowski suggests ... you're not suppose to look at the thing, you're suppose to look through it. It's a window.

When viewing a print (the thing), most people don't "see" the print, they look right through it and "see" the thing depicted. Not that this should come as a big surprise, after all, a picture is just a picture, right? And, to a certain extent, the medium's most unique characteristic - that which distinguishes from the other visual arts - its inherent and irrevocable relationship to and as a cohort of "the real", tends to work against the perception of anything but what is depicted.

A print is most often judged only by what it depicts in a very literal sense. It is what it appears to be and nothing else. It only represents the denoted. There is no such thing as the connoted.

Because the medium is so rooted in "the real", there seems to be no room at all in the minds of the masses for concepts such as metaphor, symbolism, irony, paradox, allegory, allusion, and the like - concepts and devices that are readily accepted, studied, applied, and understood in a whole host of other arts.

IMO, and that of many many others, the understanding and perception of such concepts and devices in pictures is what, ultimately, separates the wheat from the chaff in determining what is and is not "Real Art". Those concepts and devices in pictures are what separates the flash-in-the-pan pictures from those with legs.