civilized ku # 1092 ~ pictures that have subjects and yet aren't attached to their subjects
Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:29AM 
20 TON BRIDGE / 900 FEET ~ Wilmington, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
You can't photograph a thing in general, you can only photograph specific things. So then the problem in terms of there being an indefinable quality of the subject is how to somehow elude the hardness of their specificity. Maybe elude is the wrong word because you can't elude it. Maybe it is more important to enter into the indefinability of anything, no matter how concretely it appears to have been portrayed. ~ Jeff Wall
I find it very interesting how many (most?) people who find themselves intrigued with / interested in a picture - which, on its face, doesn't fit the pretty picture mold - have no idea what it is, in their viewing of the picture, that has so interested / intrigued them. The most often heard comment in such circumstances is, "I don't know why I like this picture, but I do."
IMO, the viewer has been touched, at some level of their being, by the indefinable quality of a picture's depicted referent. I also believe the viewer's perplexity comes from the fact they are not very adept at consciously connecting with the level of their being which has been pricked by the unthought known.
Reader Comments (2)
I must admit that I fall into the characterization you described, I like this photograph and I'm not sure why. There are a variety of seemingly competing elements, but as a whole it "just works". It's always a pleasure reading/viewing your blog, keep up the great work.
When I read the quote, I thought you were going to expand on a different point. Only this weekend, and before I read this post, I was considering how your images are often of a "general" nature and not "specific", whereas I tend to extract a less complex element from a scene. If I attempted to do what you do so successfully, I would be concerned about producing what might be simple unstructured snapshots; very "general" and not very interesting. So I'd disagree with that first sentence, I have long thought that you manage to successfully produce interesting and pleasing images of the "general".