ku # 1331 / panoramic ~ a concretized universal

roadside autumn color ~ Clintonville, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
Au Sable riverside autumn color ~ near Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen

A student at Reed Collage said to Robert Adams, "I like art with intellectual complexity." Adams answered:

So do I, in some respects. But it's easy to confuse philosophy with art. They are not the same. It's an easy distinction to forget in school ... where you're encouraged to live an active life of the mind.

In today's academic lunatic fringe driven picture making world, it could be written, with a high degree of accuracy, that picture making MFAs end up confusing psycho-therapeutic self indulgence with art and that they are indoctrinated with the idea that complex meaning in a picture is paramount, virtually to the exclusion of a picture's visual merit - a clear cut real-world example of Sontag's idea that interpretation (aka: finding meaning) is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. That written, Adams went on to state that:

A great picture is a concretized universal. The strength of that is that it can and has to be cross-referenced out to life in the street. Philosophy carries within itself no such test.

In addition to really liking the concept of a picture as a "concretized universal", I also embrace, picture making wise, the idea that a great picture must be able to be "cross-referenced out to life in the street".

Or, in other words, that great pictures must evidence "truth" or at least a truth inasmuch as doing so reenforces that unique characteristic of the medium of photography which separates it from the other visual arts. That is, its intrinsic and inevitable relationship to and as a cohort of the real.

FYI, the riverside picture is a 2 frame blend.