civilized ku # 538-40 ~ quietening things down

Adirondack chair with pillow ~ on my front porch in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggen
Front yard in a light rain ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggenPictures made on a rainy and lazy Saturday. Although, in all fairness, it must be stated that the wife was busy as a beaver cutting and laying patio stone in the backyard.

...while photography is often seen as the amplification of something, it is also good at doing the opposite, quietening things and not enhancing them, and then perhaps you want to look at the picture, or study it, more. ~ Stephen Gill

civilized ku # 537 ~ the basis for defining a photographer's style

Light pole in a city park ~ Plattsburgh, NY • click to embiggenSven W, in his comment re: civilized ku # 531, opined/asked ...

These "dimensions" of ideal vs specific, impulsive vs pre-conceived, obvious vs framed could be the photographic equivalent of personality traits. Taken together, these dimensions / traits could be the basis for defining a photographer's style?

IMO (and that of many many others), the pictures one makes are, considered together with all of their characteristics and qualities of the medium itself, a manifestation of the characteristics and qualities of the picture maker him/herself. Or as artist Rockwell Kent stated:

art is no more than the shadow cast by a man’s own stature*...

... a notion that quite nicely reflects those expressed by artist Robert Henri in his book THE ART SPIRIT - that an artist should know him/herself as the prerequisite to finding / nourishing one's vision and the means to express it.

That said, I would add to Kent and Henri's notions that a person's act of expressing one's self by means of their art making endeavors is - for the aware, attentive, and thoughtful - a means to getting to better know one's self. And, IMO, the pictures made by such camera-wielding persons are the most complex and vigorous - aka, interesting and involving - of all.

*FYI, Kent's art was born out of both remarkable personal experience and a deep sense of moral and political principle.

ku # 772 ~ clearing skies

West Branch, Au Sable River ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggenA picture made last evening - clearing skies after a day of dark overcast and occasional rain.

civilized ku # 533-36 ~ diddling and fiddling

On the deck at the Naked Turtle ~ Plattsburgh, NY • click to embiggen
Hair of the Dog's fiddler ~ at The Naked Turtle - Plattsburgh, NY • click to embiggenOn Sunday afternoon, the wife and I attended a fundraiser for the Plattsburgh YMCA (the wife is on the YMCA Board). It was held at The Naked Turtle on the shore of Lake Champlain and the entertainment was provided by a kick-ass Irish band - Hair of the Dog.

ku # 721 ~ an infinite number of views are possible

4 views of late Spring blossoms ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggen

Although in the popular mind the photograph serves as a surrogate slice of reality, the relationship between any subject and a photograph of that subject is highly unstable. Photographic codification invariably creates some degree of alteration, exaggeration, and/or ambiguity ...[S]uch reservations not withstanding, the camera that is equipped with color film represents the ultimate mimetic tool. Certainly no more efficient method of transcribing the world exists ... [Y]et of course photographs, despite their verisimilitude, are abstractions; their information is selective and incomplete ... even when the subject is represented by a multitude of views from various vantage points, through different lenses, types of films, and so forth ... such multiple presentations present only relative, fractional objectivity, for an infinite number of views are possible. ~ from the new color photography by Sally Eauclaire

civilized ku # 532/food ~ try it, you'll like it

Deep fried pickle • click to embiggenThis past weekend will be forever remembered as the weekend that I was introduced to deep-fried pickles.

civilized ku # 531 ~ bits and pieces that, for me, fit together

Work Zone ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Au Sable Forks, NY • click to embiggenRelative to the idea of reading about the pictures made by other picture makers and finding insight about one's own work, here are some excerpts culled from multiple sources that have helped me ...

.... attempting the expressive rendering of immediate observations, not in the romantic sense of transforming the ordinary into the ideal, but for the purpose of making the ordinary vividly apparent.

.... (some picture makers) court and coax the perceptual ambiguities and accidental visual excesses typically found in unselfconscious amateur snapshots. When imaginatively enlisted to achieve fastidiously formal and/or provocatively narrative images, such effects become crucial elements of a vivid vernacular art.

.... [the] use of vignetted edges ... recalls work by Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, and others whose equipment sometimes imposed similar but unwanted effects upon their images. [this] affection functions as a formal device, balancing otherwise unreconciled, disruptive elements in certain of his pictorial schemes.

.... [he] seems quite willing to obey his impulses when shooting rather than seek subjects offering familiar or perceived themes.

.... [he] moved to photographing scenes that only became events when framed and frozen by the camera.

Does anyone out there ever read about the pictures made by others?

Does anyone have anything to offer regarding the same idea about your own work?

civilized ku # 530 ~ it's about passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you, back into the world

Post and cable ~ in the Adirondack PARK - Lake Placid, NY • click to embiggenI had to play golf yesterday so I'm a day late and a dollar short on my intent to comment on the idea that reading critical commentary on the work of picture makers can lead to insights about one's own work.

As I have mentioned many times, I read about the medium of photography on a very regular basis. Most of that reading is about theory, history, critical analysis, and photo critique stuff as opposed to gear and technique stuff. With the exception of the photo critique stuff, most of that reading is all words and no pictures.

The result of that proclivity is very often insights that I acquire about my own work.

Consider my civilized ku # 525-28 name substitution exercise of a few days ago (3 entries below) wherein the idea of a picture "convey(ing) a state of being, rather than the suggestion of any visual or narrative action unfolding" struck me as a very apt description of most of my pictures. A word-description that I would most likely never have coined if left to my own word-description devices.

IMO, the idea that my pictures convey "a state of being" very accurately describes my state-of-being when I am in the act of picturing - that state-of-being being one of (as described in civilized ku # 522-23 [5 entries below]) being actively receptive to the world around me.

And, here's the interesting thing (at least it is to me) - a state of being actively receptive to the world around one's self is, in fact, exactly the meaning, AKA - the connoted - I wish to convey with my pictures. Or, as Joel Meyerowitz opines about an artist's response to the sensation of seeing ...

The place (the subject) resonates a quality that you respond to. You feel your self in relation to its otherness ... Whether you are making images, poetry, painting, music, or love, you should be totally enraptured by that, by the experience itself. That's what it's about - the location of subject, it's about passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you, back into the world. That's what artists do. They separate their experience from the totality, from the raw experience, and it's the quality of their experience that makes them visible to the world.

Or, more simply stated - as Rockwell Kent titled his 2 autobiographies - This Is My Own (1940) and It's Me, O Lord (1955).

So, all of that said, it should quite obvious that, IMO, the more words you read about the medium, the more you might learn about your own work as well as that of others. And that knowledge and insight will aid immeasurably in not only your ability to make more interesting pictures but to also "understand" better those of others.