Are You Pursuing Answers or Establishing Questions?

<p>Larry, Perfect.</p>

<p>Julie's beautiful Blackwater series brings a photographic experience to mind. Years ago, after hundreds of prints in what seemed some kind of coherent cycle, I wondered what it was that I'd been photographing and printing so carefully (Leica IIF, Nikkor 35/3.5 and Elmar 90/4, Ilford HP4, Edwal FG7, Agfa Fotorite paper).</p>

<p>I studied ("meditated" the way we did in San Francisco, cc 1970) those prints and their contact sheets, realizing the images that most excited me had important specular highlights: the sun in chrome or in pools of water, or involved burning lightbulbs. My attention had apparently been drawn, or was at least stimulated, by the brightest details in my visual world.</p>

<p>If I was a moth I would have been drawn to flames :-)</p>

<p>Hello all:<br>

I am new here and although I have been taking pictures for quite awhile now (since the mid-1970s) I have always been asking and searching for the answers to the big questions and it's nice to be able to go to a forum and ask as well answer questions and although I may seem unconventional at times and naive--can you all bear with me?<br>

Hello,Julie...<br>

what is this really? Or This is what it is? Hmmm. Depends on who's taking the photo and later who's looking at it. I always think I know what it is until I take the photo and it becomes--what is this really? Like wading into a lake and seeing the surface but what lies beneath it? Is there another world beneath the one that we're viewing. When is a fire hydrant more than just a fire hydrant as we know it? When we give it yet another life than the one it was meant to live--yes,even inanimate objects...the poetry of photography should never be analyzed outside of the technical experience of creation and when being used to create the photograph--I am on a quest not unlike Frodo Baggins--I am on the quest to answer the mysteries of life--big quest,I know and I have chosen photography as my medium--Frodo had the ring thing going on...I am pursuing answers but the questions just keep popping up and just when I think I've got a handle on it,the truth of it slips away like water through a sieve...so,I guess that I can say that I am feeling my way through life with camera in hand and if the truth is out there;if I find that then my search would not have been in vain.</p>

<p>Marta:</p>

<p>My life has brought me to one inescapable conclusion. There are no big answers, just big questions. The fun is trying to unravel the questions and to see where they lead us.</p>

<p>I want the viewer to ask questions upon seeing the photograph. After all, it was a question that led me to photograph a given subject performing a given behavior in the first place.</p>

<p>Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "The purpose of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to clarify questions."</p>