carbonado

<<>>

LOL.

Show me a good artist or writer or photographer who's not preoccupied with the work of others.

The tradition is a hard thing to put out of your head. H. Bloom's 'The Anxiety of Influence' sees it as some Freudian battle that every artist undertakes and then spends the rest of his or her life fretting over.

I'm not sure I buy completely into Bloom's thesis, but I *do* think that photography is pretty complex.

I mean, no, it's not stuff you think about when you're walking the streets in search of a photograph, but at some point -- if we want our images to reach a wider audience -- don't we attempt (maybe unsuccessfully, maybe successfully) to grapple with the "tradition?"

Gosh, if it's merely "mumbo-jumbo", that would surely suck.

Tension is good. I like it, too. Heck, that's why I shoot with a Holga.

The problem is that tension isn't something that just appears. You gotta work to get authentic tension in a formal image. Reality doesn't look very interesting when it's jumbled onto a photograph. I think that's the crux of the various "building out of place" comments.

There's reality. And then there's a photograph, right?

John Casavettes -- the filmmaker who made 'Woman Under the Influence,' 'Killing of a Chinese Bookie' -- worked long and hard to give his film a "raw" look, filled with tension. If you told John, wow, you're films are so "raw" -- he'd love it. That's what he wanted to hear. But he made sure you understood that it took an enormous amount of work to get that raw look. It doesn't just happen.

That's not to say you're not working at your images. I mean, obviously, I have no idea. But I think that's where the various comments are coming from: that there's a photograph and then there's a reality. To depict "reality" in a photograph takes more than simply pointing a camera at "reality" and taking a photograph.

It's odd. You'd think photography would be a lot simpler than it really is.

Look, that's part of the scene. I energetically look to include (when appropriate) street lights, power lines, parking signs, odd corners of buildings, you name it. These details are part and parcel of life as it actually is on the street and anyone who objects to this realism has, in my view, consumed too much pablum for far too long.

I think part of the problem with this thinking is that all "reality" (as it exists through "realistic photography" or just "photography") is still constrained by formal photographic aesthetics.

So even the most "realistic" shot (if such a thing even exists) -- complete with streetlights, pavement, apartment buildings, and office buildings -- is still constrained by "formalist" rules. Your rules may be different than mine -- or Mary's -- but somewhere, somehow they do, indeed, exist.

So I suspect this is why some folks have an objection to the various apartment buildings or office buildings or stoplights or whatever else. I mean, you're certainly free to reject the rules -- that's fine -- but you can't position yourself in a spot where rules don't exist. (And I won't mention that it's, er, not exactly "good faith" to try and explain away the rules by claiming your aesthetic contains rules of your own making. You can certainly claim it -- as we all sometimes do -- but no one will take you seriously when you do! It's like Freud, right? Construct a system in which every possible refutation is already refuted and therefore refutation is impossible. But that's an argument for another day ...)

And you can't escape rules by saying, well, rules don't apply since I''m photographing "reality as-it-is". (Obviously, the photograph itself is its own "layer of reality" over "reality as-it-is" -- so that's a slight problem right there.)

Or you can't say, well, since I want "reality" -- and I actively seek realistic images complete with "realistic" composition-- I'm above the formalist fray. :)

You can take a snapshot of a wall, a photograph of a wall, or a digital image of a wall. But there's only one real wall. (And even that's debatable.)