Monday
Dec112006
ku # 443 and some pearls of wisdom
Monday, December 11, 2006 at 11:04AM 
We are having an extended brown season - that time between autumnal grandeur and first snow. The ski people - operators and participants - are going bats.
some pearls - If you don't know about Duane Michals, you should. Google "Duane Michals" and get to know him and his photography.
"Really, I'm so bored with photography that I cannot tell you! And I'm so bored with new photographers because it's just old photography, except it's bigger and more boring and in color and much more expensive. No new ground has been broken in photography in ages. All those German photographers are just doing very large photographs of parking lots in Tokyo. Richard Avedon knows that the next five books he's going to do will look like the last five: people standing in front of [seamless backdrops] staring at you. [...] I don't know what I'll be doing five years from now. That's what I love. Creativity comes from not knowing what the hell you're going to do."
"...The art world is so corrupt. When I first became a photographer, I thought photography wouldn't be corrupt because there was no money in it. But now there's money and the more money involved, the more the work becomes corrupted. Now that photography has gone into the realm of $250,000 for a photo, it's lost its virginity in the worst possible way. When somebody does a photograph that is so large that it can only be fit into a museum, you know it's all over. The power of photography is that a Cartier-Bresson print doesn't need to be 10-feet tall to move you. When the only value or new thing about a work is that it's enormous, photography has really gone down a slippery slope."
"If you are afraid to fail, forget it, you're never going to be a creative person. You learn more from your failures that you will from your successes. And if you find yourself saying, 'I don't have enough time,' that's bullshit. You make time for what you want to do. Or, 'I don't have enough money.' Bullshit. Paper doesn't cost anything. If you find yourself making excuses, then stop jacking yourself off, because that's what it amounts to. If you really want to do something, if you really have the passion to do something, to find your bliss, then you do it. You do it regardless."
FEATURED COMMENT: Michelle Parent wrote: "I LOVE this guy! So cool! His innerscape photos are mind boggling. I've thought of doing stuff like that ever since I picked up a camera and have never done it. I always create them in my head, but have never gone through with it. I've always chickened out, afraid people would think I was crazy or something."
Hey Michelle - Duane Michals, surprise surprise, had something to say about your comment, "...I always create them in my head, but have never gone through with it. I've always chickened out, afraid people would think I was crazy or something." Michals stated, "If I was concerned about being accepted, I would have been doing Ansel Adams lookalikes, because that was easily accepted. Everything I did was never accepted...but luckily for me, my interest in the subject and my passion for the subject took me to the point that I wasn't wounded by that, and eventually, people came around to me."
Reader Comments (2)
I am not sure I agree fully on this one particular point (or at least I can twist the point enough to not agree with it...) Specifically, if someone can create a photograph that is so large that it can only be fit into a museum AND this photograph has an effect that it could not have possibly had at a smaller size, then I would not say that it is all over, if anything it is the beginning of something new.
Unfortunately my guess is that if something like this were to be created then it requires resources not currently available to the majority of photographers.