syano

A moment in a particularly strong year for Rhodos...

I like the original photo, but I think I would have preferred it with the strings of the piano showing for context. At first glance I thought it was a piano, but then after a moment realized it couldn't be. It IS striking somehow, though, and maybe it's for that very reason.

What do you think? I realize the bottom is showing a bit of border...it could possibly use a degree or two of ccw rotation?

I think you're absolutely right. It actually seems to work quite well as a square...

The photographs I've uploaded all seem to appear darker on other computers than at home. The gamma on my monitor at home must need a bit of a tweak. Looking at this image now at work, the foreground is dark and confusing...

I know, I know. I guess it'd take a crop from the right. I don't know about the green flare, though. There is a green cast to the scene, but that is to the scene not the photograph.

The focus is on the arching trees at the front. Everything else is out of focus (where I wanted it to be). I find large depth of field distracting. This one works well as a desktop image, giving a sense of space to my square eye.

What do you think? Is a garden architecture or nature?

I like the cropping as is. It makes the couple seem further away, and is a much more intimate moment (for them) because of it. Extremely seductive, and he seems to be noticing it as they move toward that curved path of light before them--I like that backlit effect and the feeling that there is something somewhere beyond.

There is no utility in not postulating a past and or future. I just mean there IS no past or future in the moment presented, and extrapolating does little to illuminate the viewing of any image at hand.

A friend of mine, a scholar and a student of the English Renaissance, insisted he preferred studying the work of artists long dead. They were unable (and therefore not required) to defend or muck up their work with their own "interpretations" (which, in most cases, end up furthest from the mark) or presentations of their intentions (which have little to nothing to do with the work of art itself, anyway).

 

I was always inclined to agree with him. Once the poet frees his work for view, it is open to interpretation in public where it should be. It doesn't matter what the circumstances were--those are trivial facts for the biographer. The participants' faces in this photograph are what they were, and their juxtaposition does reveal an emotion, what Charles Olson after Alfred North Whitehead might call a "complex of occasions."

 

It also must be said, however, that attaching histories or stories beyond what one is presented with by a work of art is to do it a sort of violence. Characters in plays and novels, for instance, have no lives beyond what is stated. They have no mothers, fathers, pasts or futures that are not explicit in the artwork itself. Thus, the characters--though built with the raw materials provided by the actual faces and bodies of actual people--presented in this wonderful photograph have no intentions, and no lives outside of the moment presented.

 

I don't know if anyone has seen the movie The Fishing Trip, but giving your subjects enough rope...is a fair move. How many times have you heard people say of photographs or tapes of themselves, "That doesn't look/sound like me at all"? The fact is that we all live through a lot of continuous fractions of a second the entire complexity of which we are unaware, but which it is the job of the artist to reveal.

 

All elements of this image create its dreamlike uneasiness, and make the moment seem all the more fragile.

I'm not sure which you'd call the negative space, but I like the way space is divided here. The simple colours make this all about space, and the movement of the water makes it essentially a white/blue area divider. I love this kind of photo.

I just took a bunch of photos in Kyoto. Though this one isn't bad it

isn't the best. I can't figure out how to make the image size bigger

at the same time as keeping inside the 100Kb limit. Anyway, what do

you think?

I think it is the angles of the lines of the arms, legs, track and shadows that makes this more dynamic than the other photos. The tight composition, compressed depth of field and the yellow and white shoes hovering over the angled lines of the converging sections of track give the photograph its ephemeral sense and sense and locate it in time. Maybe cropping the other photos at different angles and in closer would do the same thing for them, or, then again, maybe not.

The moment is clearly ephemeral, with the light on the tree and the position of the clouds adding to the dynamic, fleeting nature of this image. Great colour, contrast, compostition and clarity where it's needed. I love the way the foreground ridges are put together.

 

Jealous.

Well, I suppose there may be some who feel they can define what a photograph is; still others yet who feel they can define art for the world; but when people start thrusting their perceptions of reality on the world, that's going a bit too far, don't you think?

 

I had a friend once who said he only read dead poets'/authors'/dramatists'/essayists works because the creators could not offer their take on their own work. The creators' views are the least reliable, and the fallacy of authorial intention is one disposed of years ago for that very reason. Characters do not exist outside of the works of art they appear in; they have no lives, no past and no future except as those possibilities are suggested in the moment they appear, and in how they interact with the experiences of their audience. All art is manipulation of a medium, a moment and an audience.

 

I do not see in black and white. My mind does not take in its whole 180 degrees or so of visible coverage without focussing intellectually and emotionally (as opposed to simply optically) on something. The photograph's strengths are its grain and its weight. As the "telltale" brightening of the image shows, all photographs need considered manipulation to give them strength and impact. If it had been left without contrast but with detail whatever emotional power it has would be lost. Cropping the sign also changes this photograph as it is considerably, and I don't think necessarily for the better. There is a balance it provides with the woman in the bottom corner.

 

I wonder if the sign had been removed if there would be such uproar. Somebody a few dozen posts back (can't be bothered looking for the post now) can't believe the audacity of some photographers using photoshop to pass off bad photos as great. Even if that were possible, isn't the problem with photoshop when it detracts from the images quality in form and/or content somehow?

 

Not much real art criticism happening here, but what there is I enjoyed.

 

I like the image. The composition, texture and colour all reproduce in me the feeling I had inside on those rainy Vancouver days gone by, and the emotion a work of art instills in its audience need not necessarily be a product of its subject matter.

 

Equivalents. Art is reality. Truth is beauty...and any other way it's been said over the past four or five millenia.