civilized ku # 531 ~ bits and pieces that, for me, fit together
Friday, June 11, 2010 at 09:59AM 
Work Zone ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggenRelative to the idea of reading about the pictures made by other picture makers and finding insight about one's own work, here are some excerpts culled from multiple sources that have helped me ...
.... attempting the expressive rendering of immediate observations, not in the romantic sense of transforming the ordinary into the ideal, but for the purpose of making the ordinary vividly apparent.
.... (some picture makers) court and coax the perceptual ambiguities and accidental visual excesses typically found in unselfconscious amateur snapshots. When imaginatively enlisted to achieve fastidiously formal and/or provocatively narrative images, such effects become crucial elements of a vivid vernacular art.
.... [the] use of vignetted edges ... recalls work by Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, and others whose equipment sometimes imposed similar but unwanted effects upon their images. [this] affection functions as a formal device, balancing otherwise unreconciled, disruptive elements in certain of his pictorial schemes.
.... [he] seems quite willing to obey his impulses when shooting rather than seek subjects offering familiar or perceived themes.
.... [he] moved to photographing scenes that only became events when framed and frozen by the camera.
Does anyone out there ever read about the pictures made by others?
Does anyone have anything to offer regarding the same idea about your own work?
Reader Comments (2)
I do read a fair amount about the work of other photographers and artists but there's a quote by Mikail Jorgensen (from the band Wilco) that has really stuck with me lately and kind of puts a finger on how I tend to go about my photographic life:
"If you can find that balance between instinct and thinking, your shit gets rocking. I call this attempted balance "brute ignorance." It's finding that unique personal sound, chord voicing, or phrasing with a reckless irreverence."
Of course Jorgensen was thinking as a keyboardist but I still think it describes my mindset as a photographer pretty well.
I like this image. It somehow pulls together and works, especially as it's a classic example of a scene most people would simply walk past without a moment's thought.
These "dimensions" of ideal vs specific, impulsive vs pre-conceived, obvious vs framed could be the photographic equivalent of personality traits. Taken together, these dimensions / traits could be the basis for defining a photographer's style?