About your photographs

That articulation can be a means of discovery, where non-articulation can often be an avoidance or downright denial.

 

As always, the balance and counterpoint I achieve between directly considering my reasons and just letting photography flow will fluctuate. But the wildest rivers still rage (floods excepted) within banks. So those riverbanks may contain some significant secrets.

Sam, you make two important points here: articulation, flow, fluctuating flows.

If I think about it, that's exactly how I "create" in my daily business:

• I talk to my peers about my ideas, about the problems we need to solve and articulating, listening to the articulation leads to solutions!
  
• I let myself be touched by certain ideas, concepts, facts, at random. And then let the thoughts flow freely, without consciously thinking about the single issues or the problem as a whole. And, oftentimes the flow leads to ideas.
  

And, guess what, that's exactly what I'm doing now for my photography? What, matter and relevance will flow out of this process. And this takes me away from the "walking around snapping away at stuff or people, to see how things look photographs", which personally I can't bear anymore. ;)

• What do you photograph?
  
• To whom does it matter?
  
• Why is it relevant?
  

(1) There are no restrictions on what subjects I choose to photograph and why.

(2) It matters to me. I won't speak for anyone else. (You can verify this by looking at the number of views my photos draw.)

(3) I could care less about relevance.

In photography i found a means of expression that i like and it feels good. I cannot write well, i cannot dance well, i cannot speak well enough to make it feel good. With photography and other art mediums i feel there are no self imposed constraints to my creative voice. I can fly wherever i choose.

The "relevance".. beyond it being a part of who i am, has always been a constantly moving target for me. Currently that means acknowledging - memento mori - in front of and behind the lens. It is bittersweet and uplifting, grounding and freeing, dark and light.

The reward is...

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."

Robert Frank

I’ll answer this way which is basically just honest:

1. Things I find

2. Me

3. I don’t care if it is.

That may sound flip but it’s true. I find photographs, I don’t make them. I photograph things because I want to, not because someone else wants me to and I honestly don’t care if it’s relevant to anyone else. This hasn’t always been true as there many things done for pay but I’m an old tired bastard now so I don’t do much paid work anymore.

Rick H.

 

I am progressing towards some awareness but am distant from any conclusion.

 

What do you think?

I think with something as open ended as these issues that is basically the human condition.

We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake [ … ] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:—but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

—Edgar Allan Poe

Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [ … ] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.

—James Whistler

Art for art’s sake is dead - if it ever lived.

—Edward Steichen

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.

—David Hockney

Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well fed.

—Frank Lloyd Wright

I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

—Lou Reed

No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Art for art’s sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

—George Sand

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

—Arthur Conan Doyle

When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless — in short, art without purpose, a worm chewing its own tail.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

I find some value in all of this. I’m thankful I don’t have to pick one.

• What do you photograph?
  
• To whom does it matter?
  
• Why is it relevant?
  

I photograph people, usually musicians or people listening to musicians. I like to watch people having a good time. It doesn't matter at all to anyone except me. As for relevance, why does it have to be relevant? Relevance is greatly overrated, if you ask me.

Many of my photographs are not about the photograph.....

I have been enjoying old, manual focus lenses as toys- they aren't that expensive and I can sell them for half what I paid for them, or so.

Commonly I throw an old lens on and just go out and take photos of anything, to see how the lens feels and looks. I delete most of them, but some are keepers, especially my pets, or spring flowers. I currently am waiting for a perennials crop in a neighbors yard that I have tried for 3 years to adequately capture. Early July.....

A few lenses are really nice. Later when I go on a photo trip I know my lenses better, and which ones to take.