ku # 1225 ~ pond scum

Algae, AKA - pond scum ~ Newcomb, NY - in the Adirondack Park • click to embiggenIn yesterday's entry, I noted that words, picturing wise, are in short supply of late. In part, that situation is simply because over the past few years, I have written a zillion or more words, covering a very broad range of topics, about the medium and its apparatus.

Much of that writing, as I have previously noted, was me talking out loud and to myself - a journey with the aim of understanding and codifying my relationship to and with the medium and its apparatus. Suffice it to write and for quite some time, I have been very pleased with the outcome of that experience inasmuch as I have a more developed grasp, intellectual and emotional, regarding the act of picture making and picture viewing (my own and those made by others).

Two quotes - one on the notion of picture making, the other on the experience of picture viewing - which encapsulate much of what I have come to grok, the medium and its apparatus wise, come to mind ....

Quit trying to find beautiful objects to photograph. Find the ordinary objects so you can transform it by photographing it. ~ Morley Baer

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, 'There is the surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.' Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy... The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness. ~ Susan Sontag

None of the preceding is to write that I have figured everything out because, in fact, I have not. In a very real sense, I hope to figure more of "it" out, a little bit at a time, as time and experience(s) go by. IMO, learning is a life long endeavor, the pursuit of which never ends.