Another year has passed and unlike 2021, 2022 seems to be the least productive year I had. I can lay on a cornucopia of excuses in which some are valid and some can be just chalked up to plain laziness. But instead of spilling my guts out, cry and hope that the few, very few, people who read this post will forgive me. I am just going to suck it up and move on. At my age I don’t think there is a lot I can do to attract attention beyond my friends. So this year I am going to do whatever the fuck I wish on this page and not worry if it gets eyes or not.
I was listing to a podcast and I wish I could remember who and what show it was, but one of the host stated to the effect. Photography is not an art because you are only recreating what is in front of you. There is nothing unique about the scene nor are you putting your interpretation of what you are seeing. You are taking a photo at a specific time of a specific place and if anyone were to go to that same place at the same time, they would get the same or very close to the same photo. So why is it art? So me something new about that place, show me your interpretation as well as convey your feelings, then it maybe art.
My first instinct when I hear that was to say; “Well of course this is the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage! You sit here on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker’s cuss for the struggling artist.” But after a few days of John Cleese screaming in my head and trying to calm down I finally managed to truly think about what they were trying to say. Its not enough to take a photo but there must be more for the viewer to get from your work other than, ‘That’s Pretty.”
Think about all the photographers that came before. Each one was an innovator, did something that no one had done before. They created a result that showed the viewer a point of view they didn’t see before. I know that it is a hard concept to put into words so bear with me. Lets take Ansel Adams. Landscape photography wasn’t new but what he did to it was. By placing a red filter in front of the lens during the exposure and working the print in the darkroom to get the most out of the greyscale, he got a print that no one had seen before. It gave a realistic representation of the subject that gave a viewer a new way of looking at what would have been a common scene. It conveyed emotion. His work still does to this day. Some of the better landscape photographs I have see has more drama in the way they use the light and darks. What is in the shadows that you just see and what isn’t there.
Now that photography is everywhere and with more images uploaded in to the web for us to see, it is getting hard to come up with a new methods or tricks to get eyes on the image. This only means I have to work harder at my craft and maybe I may come up with something that catches people’s attention. Now I don’t mean try some new preset or cheep trick to get you to look at my work. I mean I need to just work on what I believe moves me. Things that I’s passionate about. Create an image and work the print so that I provoke and emotion in the viewer they never had about the subject before. Isn’t that what art is about?
2023 is going to be hard in that regard but maybe on this journey, even if I am not successful in the end, I will have learned something and isn’t that what it’s about?