mizore

July 19, 2017

Begonia in bloom

January 24, 2015

If you're just interested in one person's opinion, the thing to do is send a private message. Trying to restrict a public forum to just the responses you want defeats the purpose of having a public forum where people might be reading the comments next month, or next year, and not have the same biases you do for one person's opinion only.

November 27, 2014

A6000 and the Sony/Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 is a nice combination, though not particularly cheap. I use m43rds for telephoto and the a6000 for wider angle lenses.

July 4, 2014

And it works, but it's necessary to authorize the program before posting.

July 4, 2014

Sony A6000 can do this with internal add-on programs, free from Sony.

March 4, 2014

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March 4, 2014

If people are photographing birds or sports professionally, then yes, they probably should get the full monty set up of long fast lenses and a D800 or Canon equivalent and tripod with Wimberly mount because they need to get the shots. For those of us who aren't professional bird photographers, some of the fun is taking the shots we can get with lighter gear, not with more expensive, heavier gear.

March 2, 2014

The camera has focus peaking and magnification. For general medium distance shots, focus peaking works well. Closer, use magnification (set the camera to have focus aid on, and when the camera has a manual lens on it, the bottom soft button turns on the magnification. This is from a manually focused 50mm lens on an adaptor at f/5.6:

March 2, 2014

With a GF1 and a hummingbird. I understand that some of the later micro43rds bodies are even better.

February 22, 2014

The Alpha 3000 is about the only interchangeable camera available in many smaller cities in the developing world (at least in Nicaragua) and is cheaper than the entry level DSLRs from Nikon and Canon. I bought one because it was the only interchangeable lens camera I could buy in the city where I live. I can order lenses and adaptors from B&H but don't like buying cameras I can't handle first.

June 23, 2012

The problem for artists is how to survive (and recognition is orthogonal to that problem), and whether sacrificing for the art makes one a better artist than simple finding some way to make money and do art. Academia in the US is what a lot of artists get involved with; here it's various political things and advertising (Nicaragua). Some countries, it's journalism.

My impression is that some cultures value art more than other cultures -- black US culture doesn't appear to have put so sharp a knife between popular and elite arts as white US cultures (academic hostility to the genres where that exists). Here in what's a provincial small city in Nicaragua, everything from coffee to cast mould ceramics to paintings on canvas is at the local art center. When I wrote poetry, the thing people did was get an academic position; otherwise poets got hammered by their coworkers if they ever mentioned what they did (with some exceptions) and live in a world that has no basic use for poetry that's not music lyrics. Or poets had enough of a trust fund to get buy on, sometime, quite a trust fund (Kenward Elmslie, a couple of others). I don't know anyone who stayed in poetry of my friends from the early 1970s who didn't end up in academia. The folks who didn't want to become academics and who didn't have trust funds ended up leaving poetry -- one friend is now an environmental activist and a paid private archivist. I ended up in tech writing for a while before I could collect SS and move to Nicaragua. Another friend has to work a day job to support teaching at Naropa and her own poetry.

So, poetry, the queen of the literary arts, as one professor told me when I was in graduate school the last time, has no audience compared to hip hop, but being recognized enough will make a poet more money than actually being a decently published s.f. writer. Whole field is completely detached from the idea of any kind of non-specialist audiences.

I did know one poet who was a translator in NYC, about the only one.

My suggestion for young writers or photographers isn't to stay in journalism forever, just knock the edge off the art school/MFA program elitism.

Photojournalism is what people who don't have trust funds or MFAs do to be photographers and get paid for it. I suspect things are now worse than they were when I was in the 20s and 30s, and that the kind of job I had is even rarer. But to try to drive a wedge between what people who don't have money can do to be artists and what people with money or cultural capital can do seems to be unhealthy for the art that gets so divided.

Most of the pro photographers I met in Philadelphia were black -- it was an opportunity for them to do something that was creative, at least at times. Most of the academics who taught photography weren't making a living at it other than by teaching it.

June 23, 2012

Found this which is suggestive for narrative works, but perhaps not for photographs if the research results for movies is also true of photographs:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20120514/9878/book-reading-experience-taking-psychology-character-fiction.htm

Narrative that allows people to initially identify with a character and then moves the person into another conceptual space seems to work at changing people's minds. We are perhaps too aware of where we are in relationship to an image to have them affect us in the same way that narrative fiction does.

June 22, 2012

I think I'm an agnostic -- it's arrogant to presume that I know all qualities of the universe.

Alan Zinn, in this one, I think about a photo Julie posted of white women photographing seriously ill African children. Then and probably even more now, I read it in about 180 degrees different than I think Julie read it. Poor Africa, it gets the same kind of people we get here, the poverty tourists looking for color is how I read it. My values are trying to keep from being that kind of visitor to a poor country. Julie saw it as concerned caring women taking photographs.

People shoot things all the time with one set of values they're sure are implied and supported, to find that other people read the photographs completely differently (books channel things a bit more, but George Orwell talked about how Jonathan Swift was unconvincing as a thinker but very powerful as a novelist, so that's not always the case). Another case in point is the South Vietnamese officer shooting the spy. The photographer who took it liked the officer, didn't appear to imagine that this would be a strong anti-war image.

I think taking photos to be didactic is bad faith with the audience. Anyone's values will be in the photographs, but when that's the purpose of the photograph, to change other people's minds, it's a disrespecting of the viewer. What artists do better is the technical mastery of their arts. I've never seen any reason to believe that art makes anyone a better human being except for the things that would have been gained through any skill mastery and lowering of ego.

June 21, 2012

This is like the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis vs. the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Strong S-W is that language determines what we can think, no way out. Our perceptions are based on our language which has certain categories that channel our thinking that we can't escape. Weak S-W is that our language tends to channel our thinking but not utterly and inescapably.

I've been re-reading George Orwell essays and one of the things he points out is that people resist changing their minds rather more than other people opposing them would like to imagine is possible.

We're more likely to have our values confirmed by our choices in art than for art to change our minds about our values (Picasso's audience were not trade unionist Commies, after all).

Like Julie's earlier question, the weak position is probably the more realistic one. Soviet art in the 1950s made that system look as hideous as Confederate art made slavery look, or that the various Christian reactionary artists today make their position look (and it's very similar to Social Realism from the Soviet era).

June 20, 2012

You've got published fiction and a Ph.D. dissertation based on your novel and someone else's novel? I do. Journalism made that possible. Perhaps I was fortunate in the chance encounter between me and the weekly newspaper I worked for. The thing is that it's hard to maintain the typical stereotypes of the police after you've been in a cop shop when people heard about a highway trooper being murdered, or talked to people about their jobs that weren't like yours. I know a couple of other writers who've gotten very good things from the journalistic work they've done. Given that Sony has had a fit over the FSLN using "Stand By Me" as their election campaign song and the FSLN not really giving a damn, and me checking to see who wrote what Sony was claiming as their property, yes, but we do know Ben E. King wrote "Stand by Me," after all.

What Auden was talking about were people doing "art" more than popular music people getting their work stolen by white musicians and large corporations. Black culture is community culture more often that not, what people who don't have Ivy League/Oxbridge eductions make as their music. I've lived in an Appalachian area where most of the local musicians were actually quite good, where at least music wasn't something that set one apart from the "broad masses." People in those communities generally have good taste for their music, and the people who do better jobs than others tend to get recognized. Cf. the Mayan weavers -- every woman in the culture is a weaver, some better than others. (And we had one moronic doctor's wife who wanted to save the locals from their terrible hillbilly music and who brought in a white boy who paid flamenco guitar -- white boy immediately found the local musicians and played with them for several hours).

The US is racist. even more so in my youth (I grew up in the US South) and it's easy to see that for a lot of blacks in the US, sports or music is a way to escape or console themselves. Did they make huge amounts of money from it? Some did; some didn't. Did they get recognition in their communities? I suspect so -- that recognition was what attracted those who robbed them. I could make an argument that native non-representational art was looted by Europeans for the transformation in the arts there. I'm still waiting for Sony to invade Nicaragua. That had to have been the funniest breach of copyright I've ever seen (Ben E. King wrote the thing -- John Lennon has covered it). Ben E. King is still alive, born in Henderson, NC, now living in New Jersey. I don't know if he leased the rights to Sony, or if they bought them outright.

Most of the horrors of modern media for "the masses" come from people who have considerable contempt for people who weren't educated as they were, who don't have the leisure to investigate what they had the leisure to investigate (here a non-rich child who goes to high school is also probably working, and that was true of many working class people in the US).

It's still the case that a lot of things that wouldn't pass the photo editor at a half good newspaper get hung as art photograhy by museums because the photographer has the right cultural capital.

One of the better photographers I knew was a guy in rural Virginia. He had a good eye. Frankie Robinson. Sometimes, people only get recognized by a few people. I had him shoot the cover for one of my small press books. And I still say W.H. Auden was right -- most people get more recognition than they deserve than get less recognition than they deserve. How the world pays or doesn't pay them is a completely different matter, but it's easier for bad "fine" arts people to get a sinecure than it is for a hiphop artist to get one. Yet, kids here know hiphop, not Milton Babbit (one of the town murals is apparently of an American hiphop artist).

June 20, 2012

Most people have a set of criteria for what they'll communicate and what sort of people they'll receive communications from -- it's very human, but I'm not sure it's classically Humanist in the Italian Renaissance sense of the world.

June 18, 2012

Getting film and chemistry in Nicaragua is possible but not easy. I don't know anyone other than the Kodak shop in town that will process it and it's not easy to get chemistry. B&W supposedly is hit or miss. DSLRs of either species are rare here, too. Most people use phone cams or P&Ss. The Kodak pro shop in Managua can get medium format films, but the only thing they had in stock was 35 mm. Films come from Mexico or China these days.

Lots and lots of people who do photographs of various kinds and who print photographs in the small city I'm living in, but it appears to be all digital.

June 18, 2012

Quick Google suggests that Damien Hirst is doing art for at least ego-boo's sake. Viewers are not artists -- artists who do good work have to find a way to be viewers as well as artists. (I used to ask my students if they'd read their essays if they found them in a newspaper). Most mediocrity comes from not being able to cultivate the internal disinterested viewer/reader who can spot the places that don't work.

Theodore Sturgeon -- "90% of anything is crap." My particular field is Janusian -- sometimes popular and sometimes rather esoteric and not easy to read. Good and bad work has been done by both ends of the spectrum. My prior field was big on conceptual and formalist considerations and on difficulty of access. Most things have limited appeal because they're just not that good. William Burroughs thought people who assumed that popular works were all about promotion were kidding themselves.

I haven't seen in 40 years of being involved with various art scenes that there's purity on one or the other side of the identity/community spectrum. (One of the dimmer academics wanted to believe that things like SF weren't the product of people with Ivy League or Oxbridge eductions just like the identity arts, but the product of the broad masses, whoever they're supposed to be these days). Probably NYC has better art than London because the gallery owners and museum curators were more likely to actually like artists (head of the Museum of Modern Art was Claus Oldenberg's brother; Frank O'Hara, earlier at the same museum, was friends with all sort of young poets and painters and wrote poetry).

If a person has a heavy investment in the identity of liking art with limited appeal that is more original than community art, then he's perhaps easier to fool, than someone who wants vicarious winning experiences shared by his community. Rowling may not be a great artist, but she did something new when she blended the style of boys' school stories with fantasy. I know a number of people who like her work very much, and none of them particularly the "broad masses."

There's nothing more unoriginal than yet another concept artist these days, another chance musician, another cut up fiction, another portrait with mood lighting (yeah, I've done those, too). Really looking at the conventions and understanding them and riffing off them in a way that isn't obvious can be more exploration of the media than "challenging the bourgeoisie," given that the people who have the leisure to learn the conventions of the unconventional are likely to be the bourgeoisie. Dada was a long time ago.

There are cultures where curating isn't a gig, where there are no gatekeepers for art. These cultures do tend to be conventional. A friend was in Guatemala recently and in one of the areas where people do superb weaving but most if not all of the motifs are traditional. Things that are conventional can be superb or not. In cultures where every woman is a weaver, some are better than others.

I think it's currently harder to do good work out of popular conventions because it means breaking down one's self-defensive resistance to community art and really looking at the popular genres and understanding them well enough to rift off them in ways that add some different insight to the genre. You don't get a free pass for doing things that look like other limited appeal works.

Anyone who says "broad masses" is mis-educated. I tell young writers to get a job as a journalist on a weekly country newspaper for a year or two -- really write for a living. If you're not a good enough writer to get such a job, then why in the world would you imagine that you can do "literature?" Working on a newspaper also breaks down the mis-education pretty fast. I suspect that working as a photo-journalist after the Rhode Island School of Design or the Slade would do the same thing. Deepen your understanding of people (perhaps not really necessary for a photographer as much as it's critical for a novelist).

I agree with Auden -- people who don't get the recognition they deserve are far rarer than people who get more recognition than they deserve. People are all clever primates, none of them significantly smarter than others, just with different backgrounds, advantages, and disadvantages.

June 17, 2012

David, the thing is that fine arts vs. utilitarian arts is basically late. What's a portrait? What's William Blake? Fiction is all art for its own sake, only the claims for one genre being literature (good) and other genres being crap are part of the loading that trying to say art for its own sake is "fine" (loaded adjective) and other things are not are problematic.

What about non-functional art and functional art, where the semantic loading would be in the other direction. Is there ever art for art's sake, really? Or representation without composition? Fine is a value-loaded word. Art is for playing visual games with your brain on one end and representation on the other, with a lot of things being not heavily weighted either direction.

Representation is an expected value in photography; plot is an expected value in fiction, still after all the 20th Century experimentalists' attempt to dislodge it. We can play various games around those expectations (everyone who reads French New Fiction raise their hand; everyone who really likes abstract photography raise theirs). Narrative is a way people have of making sense of their worlds; fiction can be more or less transparent about this.

Sentimentality is dragging in strong associations we have and attaching them to mediocre work. If we decide that what the general public likes is facile and stupid, then we're likely to commit sentimentality in liking things that the general public doesn't like simply because they don't like it. Arts tend to be either inclusive or exclusive -- about building a community or about separating oneself off from the general community. Some arts have been both -- jazz is an example. It's now an identity art, but it was a community art. Photography has both identity and community strains. The interesting thing might be to play across those two poles -- which I think some people have been doing for a while.

Luis seems to want an identity art -- something that distances itself from the community. Cartier-Bresson moved from being a surrealist to being more of a community artist, but the surrealism and formal art training was there, too.

Sentimentality isn't just for people who like Thomas Kincaid with his kinky fiery houses and demented gingerbread.

June 17, 2012

Luis, nobody else cares, really, what claims artists make about their work -- the people who put it in a gallery, or whatever, are viewers interested in their esthetic pleasure. They may or not be better informed viewers than not, but the history of art forgery is littered by highly trained but aging viewers who thought they were right about misattributions. They function as viewers. Viewers, too, can be better or worse, fakes or really competent, understand the history of the medium or not.

The gallery and museums are run by viewers more than they're run by artists, and artists are viewers of other people's work. When artists want to declare themselves above viewers of any kind, including other artists, they're generally crap or very young and maybe capable of better. You're admitting that the viewers always decide (unless artists run their own galleries which can be good, but then they're each other's viewers). Intensional fallacy is a no-no. The artist tries; the viewer/reader decides (I'm back in print with some books I went through periods of hating deeply, but they made their own friends while I was off pouting).

Plenty of things I've found interesting at one point of my life and went back to and shook my head. It served a purpose in my life for a short while, but it had no staying power with me. And people can be fooled, though the frauds generally are one generation deep (William Dean Howells, though not a fraud, was a friend of all sorts of really first rate writers despite being less than first rate himself).

The obvious observation anyone who's been in art or writing scenes is that the worst are sure they're wonderful and the best are far more diffident (appears to be true of all sorts of human endeavors -- it's always the third rate colleges that brag they're equivalent to the first rate ones because they offer courses in the same things; the incompetent don't see how incompetent they are; the competent have an informed measure for competence that may not be completely fair).

Since I was the one who brought Yeats into this, I'll reference W.H. Auden's http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544 elegy for Yeats.

People who wrap themselves with the Art is so superior to the Unwashed masses generally do crap work. Not always, but that's a good way to bet.

I assigned going to a faculty reading to my students and went myself. The work was not experimental in the often common academically derivative experimental way, and wasn't as bad as I'd feared. My students said that it wasn't as bad as they'd expected. I'm a fairly sophisticated reader; they weren't. The college prof writers were claiming they wrote literature. It simply was fiction or poetry that wasn't awful, not that different from what any range of amateurs produce.

Sometimes, it's just fiction unless literature is now the amateur fiction that academics do.

Allen Herbert, then there's the photographer who saved the life of his subject, the burning girl in Vietnam. She's now in Canada. I believe they've met since and have done presentations together.

The problem with arts now in the US and possibly in Europe is that they've been taken over by the idle and often unaccomplished rich. People who inherit money don't always have any better taste than my grandfather, who had a decent eye for photography and for certain art and had nothing tasteless on his walls (can't say the same for one of my uncles, or for the rich maternal uncle in California).

June 17, 2012

The best way to deal with copyright violators is the take-down notice to their web host. The photographer doesn't know when he or she sends out a takedown notice to the provider what sort of person has decided to use his/her photograph without permission. The person who used this man's photographs is apparently using other people's unlicensed work without their permission. This may not be the first take down notice GoDaddy has received for her web pages.

Not everyone trying to start a business or unregistered charity using other people's work without their permission is sane.

June 17, 2012

Really serious yes to following through on photographs, especially in other cultures where hobby photography of other people and other people's things is rare. A friend promised a market stall operator some photos and never came though. The stalls have since been demolished, so getting the woman her photos now will involve me asking around the new market to see if anyone knows her, if I ever get the photographs from the friend. Probably won't happen.

Burning DVDs works -- most people can read those on DVD players (much to my amusement, a local bar tender played one of my DVDs of his family on the bar's DVD player). Email works if they have email (and is a fairly easy thing to do if you're back home and they're several hundred or more miles away).

Take pictures of things they're proud of and don't take pictures of stuff they'd rather not have you take pictures of no matter how colorful and highly textured it looks like to you. It's annoying to see someone looking for "poor, colorful, and weatherbeaten" over "trim, trig, and new."

Spend some money at the local stop and shop mom and pop store and show them your photographs. By the next day, the village will know all about you.

June 15, 2012

The question has that nasty little qualifier "fine" in it, and as a person who is an escritura in Nicaragua without qualifications (despite telling people I write fantastika) and a science fiction writer in the US (qualitifed, not just a writer), I tend to feel that this is an utterly bogus distinction that betrays the instructor's agenda. The Nicaraguans don't care what I write; the USAnos insist on finding out what I write so they can peg me. The problem isn't art; it's trying to privilege some of it as "fine" and the other as something else. It's treating "fine" as a privileged genre, not a thing that any genre can be or not be (genre defined as a group of writers who bounce ideas off each other and whose work tends to require specific strategies in observing/reading/listening to it).

I think one of the issues here is trying to make one kind of doing photography, with the weight on the esthetic side, the "fine" art photography, and the other kind of photography, with the weight on the representational side, the non-fine art photography. Fine isn't a genre -- fine should be a description of things that continue to hold our interest beyond the first seeing or first reading or first listening.

All human art (cooking, building a house, making clothes, writing a novel, taking photographs) can be done better or worse. It's not fine art unless it's actually really good. And most of the stuff that tries to be fine art is merely pretentious.

I've found that most people who claimed to have broken new ground hadn't.

Gary Snyder said that you can learn more about doing things well from a master carpenter, things that will apply to doing art in completely different mediums, than you can from a mediocre photographer, or that I could learn from mediocre poets when that was what I did.

"Fine art" is the problem. I was assigned to teach from a textbook once that declared that what people enjoyed was not as good literature as what people didn't enjoy, pretty much in those terms. Fortunately, I liked what I liked, read things before they were introduced in the classroom. With rare exceptions (generally black students), none of my students read poetry for pleasure. I don't think the US has had a popular poet since Ginsberg, maybe Snyder still is, and Frank O'Hara was outside the the university but not as popular as Ginsberg, but better to read after one grows up.

And a rather shocking number of faculty didn't read it for pleasure either. Either people like (are entertained by) shocks to their preconceptions, playing with their visual cortexes, or they're faking it to continue to hold a job or a self-image. Or somewhere in between.

The best way to be repressed in art is to feel that the only thing worth doing is "fine art." I like fooling around with cameras and I realize I wasn't going to break any new ground in photography when one of the people here treated me as a student at 60 (and I know what I think of people who want to be "serious" writers after retirement). I still enjoy messing around with cameras and looking at photographs. I take the photographs I can take.

Someone who can think visually generally does interesting work, whether it's drawing or photography, just as people who like language qua language, who think about how language works, tend to be better writers than people who want to write a tract for the world.

Can photo-journalist shoot photographs that hold our interest after the event they were documenting isn't interesting anymore? Depends on the photograph.

June 15, 2012

David Bebbington -- I like Cindy Sherman because of the irony of it. It's not the same thing.

I think we've had a lazy question asked by a lazy student. The concept of some graphic arts being fine despite being not-good vs. some other graphic art being not fine regardless of any thing else because it wasn't deliberate done to be fine is really idiotic stuff you get from second rate wannabes. "Well, I may not be successful/have anyone who knows the field knowing who I am, but I'm not doing ad work/photo-journalism/baby pictures."

If we're going to be honest, most people who do "Fine Art" as a deliberate things are tediously boring, in the same ways that "Poets Against the War" tend to be.

Fred, most of why we look at Man Ray is that he photographed people in sometimes an interesting way.

A lot of reactionaries were people who were the avant guardes of their day -- the whole Stein/Pound/various Italian futurists. Modernism in literature for the most part was reactionary and elitist.

The people who quote the Bible tend to go for a range of things.

There is really no progress in the arts other than getting bored with what's been done. The best work of the Paleolithic doesn't get invalidated because of 20th Century Art. Eyeballs and visual cortexes get bored and move on to something that's more currently stimulating. When I was a kid, everyone thought the Victorian houses were ugly. Sometime a bit later, people decided they were really cool.

Shrug. The idea of permanent artistic revolution is rather dated at this point.

One of the great things about 20th Century art was selling the theory rather than the work itself. People can be conned into thinking things are great when they're really not so great. It's the whole "I'm literature even if I don't write as well as some commercial hack" crap. Modern arts was part of the unhinging in the 20th Century, part of the insanity of the 1930s and 1940s.

Much of the revolt in painting has also been reactionary, a protest against democratization and the rise of technology as a social force. Maybe this is a good and justified thing -- one of my friends in San Francisco said that only peasants and aristocrats had taste. Got to keep those folks who believe in the common divinity of all people and the forgiveness of sins in check.

One of the reasons most people, including the publishing and television industries, can't predict what the public will like next is that they're assuming that the public (even the mass audience) will continue to want what they've been wanting and because the bean counters and sales people aren't capable of creating something that will make it new again. It's why fashions in clothes change; it's why fashions in visual and written arts change. But it's not going to make a permanent change in society in the way that some of the modernist painters imagined. Technology is what makes permanent changes in society, for better or worse.

What's good and useful about visual and literary arts is that they can improve your perceptions, but a right wing elitist is going to be a more perceptive right wing elitist for having read Charles Bernstein or looked at Picasso, not become radicalized. See Nelson Rockefeller as an example.

Painting down here is not hung up on the sort of distancing from whatever the public taste is at the time. If a poet wants to be revolutionary, he or she picks up a gun. Street painting was revolutionary, mainly because the Guardia shot you and your crew if you were painting political wall art in the late 1970s before the revolution. And yet, despite my own politics, one of my favorite local paintings is Jesus arm-wrestling the Devil whose arm is painted in FSLN colors -- derived from a US theme, as are the other two more impressive wall art pieces here: one of an American HipHop musician and the other a graffiti piece. The graffiti piece is probably the only other one with a political message -- and that message is ambiguous.

What the reactionary snobbery of modernism did was destroy the connection between what was common popular art and art that was more complex and demanding of leisure to appreciate. It lead to all the puppy and baby photographs that most people like, the LOL Kats, and Nan Goldin on the other, all brutally sentimental.

Seems like getting rid of the reactionary "high art" meme and making it painters, writers, and whatever keeps people from confusing what they'd like to do (being superior to the average person) with what they're really doing (being quite mediocre and claiming their intentions make it fine art or literature, whatever reactionary buzz word of the day).

June 14, 2012

Our culture's assumptions about "Art" ruins more work than about anything else.

Being devoted to art (not to painting, photography, music, etc.) is generally the sign of someone who's narcissistic.

Photography has been at its best when people who learned to think visually took photographs (which has often meant learning how to draw or paint first). It's been at its worst when people who thought about Art decided to take photographs (things that are set ups of paintings or earlier photographs). F 64 was a reaction against "art" photographs. Think in the medium.

For better or worse, what people look for in photographs (outside people who are trying to be photographic artists) are pictures of other people -- how do they look. I've got things on Flickr and photos of people have at least twice the views that any other photographs have.

Photography never escapes representation, especially in the photographs that have attempted to escape it. Photography never escapes visual thinking and human interest in abstract designs either, especially when used to make a representation more vivid. People are more interested in people than in a number of other things, so the presence or absence of people are also part of photography.

The trouble with the initial question is it's a dolt's question. The people who asked questions like that generally have agendas like "what most people like isn't art, but illustration; decent literature is unpleasant to read but rewarding; popular fiction has only escapist values" or any number of the defenses of mediocre academics against figuring out that trying to do art is a crap defense if you can't actually think or feel in the medium. Or they have the other agenda that everything is art, just that popular art is done by the collective folk and isn't as individualistic as real art.

I write fiction. Wondering if it's art or not, or even if it's good or not, is a sign that I'm not concentrating hard enough.

Caring about whether photography is art or not, or whether some photography is art or not, is a bad sign, most of the time.

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