ku # 1350-56 ~ installment # 3

old stone abutment ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
birch cluster ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
roadside tangle #7 ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
stream side tangle #2 ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
yellow birch leaves ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
roadside tangle #8 ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
roadside tree ~ Black Brook, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen

Quite obviously the medium of photography, its apparatus and its vernacular afford the picture maker with the means for the making of a wide range of artistic expression. However, as any long time follower of The Landscapist knows, I am a fervent and committed devotee of straight picture making, aka: the making of pictures which present an accurate and true - as much as the medium and its apparatus allow - representation of what is. On that idea, John Szarkowski wrote:

The first thing that photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supple.

But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing that the reality itself .... [T]he subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer's problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.

In so writing, it seems to me that Szarkowski has provided me with a hint to the resolution of my conundrum of being more attracted to the picture of referent than to the referent itself. To wit ....

.... it has been opined that a picture maker, in his/her act of selection, makes a picture which draws attention to the selected referent and in doing so elevates / memorializes that referent as an thing worthy of attention. In many cases, simply making visible that which, while looked at, is seldom looked into.

But of course, the referent which the picture maker has deemed worthy of attention / memorializing, the thing itself, is not the same thing as the picture made of it. The picture is, in fact, a thing in and of itself, in many cases worthy of attention and consideration based upon the merits of its visual appearance and presentation - I am referring, of course, to the thing in and of itself known as a print (if you're not making prints, what's the point?).

Consequently, I have come to the realization that the attention, interest, appreciation and admiration I give to my pictures is related to the object (the print) in and of itself and to the object / referent from which it derives. That is so inasmuch as the beauty I have extracted / memorialized from the reality of the object depicted is made manifest / realized in its representation. The referent and its representation are inexorably linked and both are worthy of attention, interest, appreciation and admiration. Although, each for reasons unique to the things themselves.

Comments

[Techfan]

Speaking of admiration I can only say that "old stone abutment" is just exceptional!