ashleypomeroy

Firstly, I haven't read the responses. Taking your points in order: transience. I remember the first time I visited in St Mark's Square, Venice, pondering whether I should enjoy the experience or run around taking pictures of everything. It struck me that St Mark's Square had been around since before I was born and would be around long after I am dead, so I could take my time. Plenty of things will be around more than fifty years from now in broadly similar form. Of course St Mark's Square hasn't been around *forever* and it might be obliterated in a few centuries by the waves, but humanity has lost a great deal. We lost the ancient wonders of the world. There will be new wonders. Fifty years from now the people will be dead or old, but again there will be new people to replace them, hopefully better and more interesting people. For those subjects that are born to die, a photographer can only take a snapshot of a moment, to present to an audience that is moving through time, in a culture that is moving through time; this is inevitable and you have to accept it. We are nomads drifting along on shifting sands. There comes a time when you realise that your culture, your art, your education and upbringing were not the objective single truth. And that your history books were just one telling of events, and that the world you grew up in was just a small bubble that will eventually shrivel and pop. You realise that in the States they have no idea who Tony Hancock was; and I imagine that in India and China they are unaware of Parks & Recreation or the career of Robin Thicke, or indeed The Byrds, who were huge in America, not so much here in the UK, probably meaningless in China. We all all specks, and the camera pulls back and there are billions of us, clumped in larger specks that shift and fade. Within living memory the European Powers *were* the whole of the meaningful world, with China and India and Africa as useful deposits of raw materials with some people living there. Five hundred years from now it will be *their* world - if not nationalities, then religions - and they probably won't care much for Edward Weston or European photographic art of the 20th century. They will have their own culture and art, and five hundred years further on they will be obliterated as well. To paraphrase Half-Life 2, one day all we cherish will be a thin layer of plastic ten metres beneath the topsoil. "Uncle Claudius, I wasn't the Messiah after all, would you believe that?" The same is true of iconic news photographs. As a British person I am acutely aware of the fact that the things my grandfather and great-grandfather thought of as objectively important are now a thin layer of brass and bakelite; there were probably iconic news photographs of the second Boer War, but they mean nothing now. The same will gradually happen to the American Civil War, the Great War, Vietnam. Things date and age. You can try to keep them alive, but it's like a dam; the longer you hold back the tide, the faster the reservoir will empty when the dam finally breaks. If history is strong it will preserve itself. And yet Julia Margaret Cameron's "Iago" still makes people pause, because the man is very handsome and the photograph is voluptuously beautiful. No matter that the model was just a hired model and that Cameron didn't have anything to say. The times, the technology, everything else is gone except for that man's face, which still makes women go weak at the knees. People are still the same, and until we evolve into blobs or develop nanotechnology we will respond to simple images of attractive people, or images of people doing something we can relate to. The simple stuff lasts, simple animal stuff. Childbearing hips, pornography, appealing people, the shallow silly stupid stuff of everyday life. We don't need to know why the kid with the big wine bottles has those bottles, the image is appealing because he looks triumphant and we were kids as well. The man about to jump into the puddle didn't quite avoid the water, and never will; we will never know what happened next, he is frozen forever. In my opinion art is the process of stimulating the minds of strangers who have not yet been born. Point two, the pepper. In theory art as pure form *should* be timeless. Art that has a kind of objective connection with the human vision should should last just as long as human beings see the world in a certain world. In contrast, art that derives its value from knowledge of the story behind the art, or of the theory, is subject to two entropic forces. Firstly the art itself dates; secondly the theory because muddled with the passing. I always use the example of The Transformers, the popular toy range. The toys were launched in Japan under the Diaclone name, with no attempt at a story or charaterisation, and they flopped; they were relaunched in the West a year later with a comic, a cartoon, characterisation, and they were hugely popular, because the toys suddenly had meaning. The toys were the same, but now they had meaning. Eventually they will be just toys again, as meaningless as Dan Dare and Brassneck and forgotten superheroes and ancient Greek gods. They will be old plastic and metal toys from long ago, mantelpiece ornaments, because ultimately they're neat toys but I can't see people of the future idolising them. But human beings love stories; they pass them down from generation to generation, and have done so for thousands of years. People love to think of Van Gogh as a tragic, haunted failure, and will tell stories about him for centuries to come, even if the stories no longer reflect reality. Nobody alive today knew Van Gogh, he is already mostly legend, an appealing legend that is easy to pass on. We remember the Greek gods because their stories were complex enough to be entertaining but were ultimately based on archetypes that date back to before history. Tragic lovers, boastful warriors, beautiful people cursed by envy, the successful king who had one fatal flaw, all of these will exist as long as we exist. If I'm driving to a thesis, it's that story-based art will survive because people will generate or pass down the story, and the art will survive, albeit that the artist's original intentions may be forgotten. Form-based art on the other hand is "form that craves art", with the problem that the art is just an illustration of something lurking in the human vision system. Weston's pepper is a striking image that will eventually be replaced by imitations, or made obsolete by advances in technology. Why should we remember Weston's pepper, and not the exact same image shot by someone else? Who owns form? The form will survive long after the art has gone, which is unfortunate if you expect that your portfolio of abstract compositions will live on after you are dead. Point ninety-seven: Time's effect on my own work. If human history is a train driving into the future, my work is asleep in bed because I decided to have a lie-in that day. I've been on the internet since before Photo.net and Flickr existed, and I can state with confidence that most if not all of the work exhibited here and elsewhere is "not even wrong". It doesn't exist on the spectrum of good or bad. It's just blank empty nothingness. Neither technically gifted nor meaningful nor honest. This includes my own work. In my opinion internet photographers who aspire to art are actually killing themselves, because they're perverting and obliterating whatever honest, unaffected truth they might have captured. We would all be better off just taking snapshots of our families, because a hundred years from now someone might look at those snapshots and think "these people were like me; I wonder if they were happy? What were they like? What life did they lead?" No-one will remember you, or the people in the pictures; if your motivating force is the pursuit of personal immortality or lasting fame, your ghost will have a very disappointing afterlife. He will witness your life's work fade and vanish. The men and women who built and launched Voyager 2 did so in the knowledge that they would not be around to see how far it got. Not be around to see it fall into a star, or simply evaporate over the course of twenty trillion years. They were motivated by what they would learn in their own lifetimes. Doomed to die. You know what happens after you die? Nothing. Your brain ceases to function. The universe is just a set of electromagnetic forces whirling about for no reason at all, it will eventually unravel into nothingness. There is no meaning, no end, nothing. And so forth. I could opine at great length on this topic, but the problem is that it takes a lot of work and it's just going to end up at the bottom of page three of a comments thread. It doesn't benefit me in this life and I was bored. And of course it will be dust in the wind when Photo.net goes away. That's a thousand words, let's not count the final paragraph. As always I meant every word and I am sincere. And as I hit submit there will be jitter and the formatting will be wrong, and the words I strove over will be made to look silly.