civilized ku # 2061 ~ going for the trifecta
Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:23AM ;)
Lamp light ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack Park • click to embiggenIn yesterday's entry, I stated that, in my first entry re: "...larger format captures always look better..." (civilized ku # 2059), I was not attempting to address / rebut all of the author's loopy assertations. While that statement remains true, there was a 3rd comment by the author which really dove me very high up the wall of picture making proscription lunacy ...
... to wit, in addressing his idea of "the unseen" he stated:
I would make an argument that from photojournalism to landscape photography to portraits to commercial to architecture to sports to wildlife and all other kinds of photography, a key element of many of the best images in the world is that they depict something that was previously unseen, and they surprise the viewer by showing something the viewer never thought he or she would ever be able to see. It can be an amazing event or very unusual natural light or a lens and an angle that allows to see things in a different way, or freezing the action, or taking a 365 day exposure, or a view through a microscope at extreme magnification, or having a very unusual subject agree to be photographed, or finding a new animal species, or taking a picture from an amazing vantage point such as the earth from the moon or something inside the human body, or some other element that immediately screams: This was unseen until right now.
Ignoring the fact that many of the author's techniques for displaying "the unseen" (which must be either "amazing" or "unusual", or, better yet, both "amazing" and "unusual" - like say, as the author suggests, "a naked picture of Queen Elizabeth" would do quite nicely) are little more than cheap and easy visual tricks, the really annoying thing for me is his assertion that some element in a picture must "immediately scream" for attention. Well, stuff my ears and cover my eyes with a bale of Dixie cotton, I don't know whether to cry or wind my watch.
IMO, that suggestion is nothing less than what's wrong with most avid/serious amateur picture makers' approach to picture making/viewing and, I might suggest, what's wrong with our culture as a whole. That is, the never-ending quest for the next BIG THING, the next BIG THRILL, the next BIG BLOCKBUSTER, at al, ad nauseum. Just rock me, baby.
Subtlety and the quiet appreciation of, well, quiet is disappearing fast over the horizon like the next BIG HIGH-SPEED BULLET TRAIN. Thoughtful, insightful, time-intensive contemplation of just about everything has been jettisoned for the ease and convenience of easy to consume pretty pictures, bullet-points, sound-bites, catch-phrases and instant and overwhelming gratification.
Why spend (waste?) time contemplating a single picture when you can sit in front of monitor, like a monkey hyped-up on Mountain Dew, flickr-ing through hundreds of hyped-up pictures an hour on the hunt for a picture thrill-a-minute? Just keep moving right along, there's nothing to see here.
None of the preceding is to say that there is no wheat amongst chaff because there is. However, finding it is starting to become a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Reader Comments (1)
Amen. Well said.