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About This Website

This blog is intended to showcase my pictures or those of other photographers who have moved beyond the pretty picture and for whom photography is more than entertainment - photography that aims at being true, not at being beautiful because what is true is most often beautiful..

>>>> Comments, commentary and lively discussions, re: my writings or any topic germane to the medium and its apparatus, are vigorously encouraged.

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BODIES OF WORK ~ PICTURE GALLERIES

  • my new GALLERIES WEBSITE
    ADK PLACES TO SIT / LIFE WITHOUT THE APA / RAIN / THE FORKS / EARLY WORK / TANGLES

BODIES OF WORK ~ BOOK LINKS

In Situ ~ la, la, how the life goes onLife without the APADoorsKitchen SinkRain2014 • Year in ReviewPlace To SitART ~ conveys / transports / reflectsDecay & DisgustSingle WomenPicture WindowsTangles ~ fields of visual energy (10 picture preview) • The Light + BW mini-galleryKitchen Life (gallery) • The Forks ~ there's no place like home (gallery)


Entries from June 1, 2010 - June 30, 2010

Wednesday
Jun302010

civilized ku # 557-59 ~ monkey see, monkey do

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Vacant stores ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Keeseville, NY • click to embiggen
A few days ago, while bouncing around the blog-o-sphere, I landed on this site/page from a link on some other site (it's all a bit of a blur). As it turned out, it was a blog I had visited sometime in the distant past and had recognized a number local-to-me scenes. Despite the best of intentions, I never bookmarked it and consequently never visited it again.

In any event, I have meaning for the past 5 years or so to get over to Keeseville picture some of storefronts on Main St. So I'd like to thank Carl Weese for the ever-so-gentle kick in ass that has started me down that picturing road.

Wednesday
Jun302010

civilized ku # 556 ~ a-z

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Draught beer and shadow ~ at Milano in the Adirondack PARK - Lake Placid NY • click to embiggen
I am working on an unusual entry - albeit unusual on The Landscapist - which I hope to have ready for posting early tomorrow. However, if it isn't posted by 8:30AM, it won't be posted until later in the day because I am due at the hospital by 9AM for a 2nd attempt at an electrical cardioversion.

The entry is an attempt to walk you, dear reader, through a start-to-finish look at one of my picture making endeavors.

I can't even begin to explain why I am doing this. It's not meant to be a picturing / processing technique how-to but rather it is meant to be more of a what-I'm-thinking-as-I-do-it* kind of thing - if that makes any sense to you. Or, perhaps a more apt comment is if I can make any sense out of it.

BTW, can anyone tell what's going on in the above picture?

*it = from what caught my eye, picturing it, making my first "selects", processing [RAW conversion and PS], making my final "select", and on to making a print

Wednesday
Jun302010

civilized ku # 555 ~ golf in the kingdom*

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10th fairway - Upper Course - and Whiteface Mt. ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Lake Placid, NY • click to embiggen
On more than 1 occasion as I golf on an Adirondack golf - many of which are over 100 years old - I fully expect the wily Scotsman, Shivas Irons, to mysteriously appear with a bottle of whiskey and a lot of wisdom about a backswing governed by true gravity.

*Golf in the Kingdom by Michael Murphy

Wednesday
Jun302010

civilized ku # 554 ~ because they were there

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Chiminea, Safe Smoker receptacle, lantern, and fence pillar • click to embiggen

Tuesday
Jun292010

civilized ku # 553 ~ waking up

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Hometown Deli ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggen
Early morning (7AM) sunlight and reflection in a big puddle at the Hometown Deli.

Tuesday
Jun292010

civilized ku # 552 ~ a 2-way street

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People doing things ~ on/along the West Branch of the Au Sable River - Wilmington, NY • click to embiggen
Stealing a glance along the West Branch of the Au Sable River.

Tuesday
Jun292010

civilized ku # 551 ~ memento mori

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Garbage that missed the trash can • click to embiggen

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. ~ Susan Sontag

Monday
Jun282010

civilized ku # 550 ~ is all good art about nothing?

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Under the big top ~ Plattsburgh, NY • click to embiggen
In the book Aesthetics and Its Discontents, it is opined that ....

... The social function of Art is to not have one ... The work that desires nothing, the work without any point of view, which conveys no message and has no care either for democracy or for anti-democracy, this work is 'egalitarian' by dint of its very indifference, by which it suspends all preference, all hierarchy.

By that measure, the tv show Seinfeld - "a show about nothing" that celebrates the minutiae of everyday life (aka, the nothingness of everyday life) with no particular POV or message - is good art. However, in books like Seinfeld and Philosophy "nothingness" is connected to deep wide-ranging questions and considerations about existence itself, aka - "the meaning of life".

Now it seems rather obvious to me that making the leap from watching "a tv show about nothing" or looking at "indifferent" and "egalitarian" pictures (work without any overtly obvious POV / message) to questions and considerations about the meaning of life requires a considerable amount of effort in the exercise of the art of interpretation. In other words, delving into the realm of the content, aka - the connoted meaning(s) to be found in a work of art work.

But, hey, wait just a minute here - that said, Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, opined that "interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art". Sontag's point is that too many "art lovers" and, in particular, art critics have over-intellectualized the concept of content - the meaning(s) to found (or, in her opinion, fabricated out of thin air) in art.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all ... (the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are).

[AN ASIDE - I have written about the idea of finding the "maximum amount of content in a work of art" vs. the idea of "seeing the thing" HERE.]

So, you might ask / wonder, what's my point with all of this? Well, as is much of my rantings, ravings, and ramblings here on The Landscapist, it's all just part of me trying to get my art / picturing making shit together. To come to grips with exactly what it is I am doing and maybe, in the process, come to a better understanding of why I am doing it.

And, FYI, I think that I am getting pretty close to getting it together and understanding exactly what I am doing - celebrating the minutiae of everyday life by making pictures that "appear to be about nothing". Not only do they appear to be about nothing, they also appear to be "work without any point of view" that also, by their appearance of having been made with a rather casual "indifference", "convey no message".

The point of all of that is to make pictures that do, in fact, illustrate "the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are." They are an attempt to stand in defiance of (as Sontag states in her essay) "the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses ... a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result [of which] is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience" because "[W]hat is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more."

In order to "learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more", the aim of my picture making is to make works of art (and, by analogy, our own experience) that are more, rather than less, real to us.

ADDENDUM - make no mistake about it, neither Sontag nor I are suggesting that the content / connoted in a work of art is a bad thing or that works of art should be little more than eye candy. But rather, speaking for myself, that a fixation on content / the connoted to the point wherein it is all-important, even to the point of obfuscating or, worse case, obliterating the denoted is contra-sensory / sensual. In fact, this excess promotes hermeneutics, when what we need is an "erotics of art".