Thinking - a bit of a rant

[Norma Desmond]

<p><strong>Marc</strong>, I think photographers can, and many do, fail. They might not actually express what they were feeling and/or what they may have been thinking, and they can learn that from viewer responses. I'm not suggesting a photographer always play to viewers, but I am suggesting that there's a stronger connection between photographer, photograph, and viewer than is often acknowledged in many of these threads and especially on the critique pages, where photographers defend against any critique by claiming the insular position of being an "artist." If a photographer completely divorces herself from viewer response and has anything at all she's trying to express, she may never give herself the chance to actually be honest with herself. I see art, especially among amateurs like myself, often being used as an excuse. Why insulate oneself from those with whom you have chosen to share your work? Wouter dealt with this above. If art can be interpreted any way by anyone who cares to look at it and I, the artist, know that, I never have to <em>commit</em> to my work, to a meaning for it, to what I'm actually intending with my photos. I may just shoot in oblivious non-thinking space. No one has to get it. That makes it a little too easy for me and a little too simple. A lot of good art is deep. It's not what anyone cares to make of it. If that were the case, we wouldn't need an artist sweating and working hard over his paintings, sculpture, or photos to express himself. We'd just need a bunch of viewers doing their own things with complete disregard to what is actually being put, by someone with a mind and intention, before them.</p>

<p>Case in point, your photograph above. Like I said in an earlier post, I wouldn't necessarily get into giving a highly specific verbal interpretation of what I think you meant by it. And viewers will personalize it in different ways. But there will also be some baseline emotional response. So, if someone came along and said you were expressing a warm and friendly family instinct, I'd feel perfectly comfortable thinking they did not get your photo at all. That's why you were not surprised by how your photos were received by the folks in Palo Alto. Because, in fact, communication and sharing did take place, within at least some range of like-mindedness. Had they said you could display your work at their store, it would have been because your work and message was deemed acceptable to them, not because suddenly they would have been getting a different message or feeling from it. Whether they accept your work or not is based on their business needs and perhaps a sense of the morals and tastes of their customers. But whether they accept your work or not, they are seeing what's in the work pretty similarly to how you are and how I am . . . then making the business decision. If hundreds of trusted viewers said they saw something with an edge in your series of photos and you were trying to portray a warm and fuzzy familial feeling with them, it would probably do you some good to listen to those reactions as based on the reality of your work rather than assuming they were just all going off on their own individual interpretation which you had no control over.</p>

[charleswood]

<p>Marc "People will view the picture and come to their own conclusions with no help from me."</p>

<p>Well, that's unfortunate because without you providing any clue in that photograph about <em>your</em> particular point of view on its subject, the photo as communication drifts around without purpose, IMHO. People coming to their own conclusions just means that people come to their own conclusions just as they come to their own conclusions when they see such a vending machine on the street. That would mean that your picture confronts a viewer only with their own mind with nothing from you except an attitude that says that you will be of no help to them. It's a mumbled, unfinished sentence about which you don't wish to speak further? Does that make sense? Does it make any sense to not put more of yourself into the picture?</p>