charleswood

<p>Fred "All that being said, I'm not sure why I would automatically consider a selfie art."</p> <p>All art is self-expression, but not all self-expression is art? And I think that Dr. Jung is looking at creativity generally, not art specifically. So all creativity is self-expression, but not all self-expression is creative.</p>

<p>Michael "Mill as suggesting this phrase with a meaning akin to the meaning of the term "dialectic.""</p> <p>I think you're onto something. That source sounds a lot like something Ms. Tippett would have read. Thanks!</p>

<p>Wouter "I do think that a sense of antagonism is part of us becoming creatively aware, a trigger for that need and want to express oneself creatively."</p> <p>OK good, that movement from antagonism to creative awareness reminds me of the Dr. Jung interview, introduced as a neuroscientist who explores creativity. Particularly, from the written introduction for the Ms. Tippett interview with him "Rex Jung has notably helped describe something called transient hypofrontality. In layman's terms, it's now possible to see the difference between intelligence and creativity in the brain. We can watch the brain calm its powerful organizing frontal lobes and become more "meandering," less directed, in order to make creative connections."<br> <br />Wouter "How novel can one still be, or how exactly does one want to see things as novel? Is picking up on 2 or 3 older movements and styles, and blending them into something personal novel, or is it a mixture of old things? Useful, to me, is too tricky. Art of art's sake, or not. Does art have to be socially engaged, or can it be purely individual? I'm not going to answer that, it's too old a discussion with too little conclusion."<br> <br />I don't know the answers to the questions you raise there. But as to the question about if a creative product has to be useful and socially engaged, yes; but that is Dr. Jung's working definition and he found that definition already in use when he began his professional work on creativity, according to his statements in the interview. So my approach is to accept that defintion for discussions sake alone.<br> <br />Wouter "In fact, I feel creatively more free if I just do as I please without thinking about those others, most of the time."<br> I hear you.</p>

<p>With the foregoing affirmation of the selfie, where women have staked out territory to finally self-define, most territory already well occupied by hosts of others who would define them in a familiar and ancient battle for control of women, a control and harnessing of nature for gain that the control of women necessarily represents: with that affirmation of the selfie and acknowledgement of women's innate struggle against being controlled I have left unaddressed the question of what follows. At what point in the future will our cultural history as recorded by photography be on the face of it an irrefutable argument against individualism, just like on the face of it the film The Army, when viewed today, is an irrefutable argument against thousands of years of authoritarianism and an irrefutable argument against the control of women and nature? At some point self will be defined in some accord that will allow for reformation of community, a reformation of the substrate of human cooperative life that isn't destructive to women and to nature. At that point those in the future will look back to our culture as expressed in part by photography, film, sculpture, literature and toss it away in wonderment at how we could ever have lived the way we live today, the seeds of our own destruction so obviously woven into the fabric of our existence the wonder will be that we didn't just at this time throw that all away.</p>

<p>Yes and so Stieglitz at some point couldn't do Pictorialism any longer. If (or since) he was at the cusp of emerging individualism, then what followed was anti-authoritarian with a Sartre finding us in a world where "...man has to decide what he is and what others are." Not able to abide authoritarian decisions about who one is and who others are, which 'failure to abide' is an antagonism that constructively constructs or creates something else. I'm also considering the idea that self-expression is antagonistic in some measure. Individual self exists in social context and Dadists emerged in dialog with existing social contexts; extreme social contexts I add because all social contexts at that time failed to prevent world war. I think the creative act has been looked at as a destructive act to varying degrees.</p> <p>Stieglitz has another quote [ Alfred Stieglitz (March 14, 1922). "Is Photography a Failure?". <em>New York Sun</em>: 5. As referenced in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz</a> ]:</p> <blockquote> <p>Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings… You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today."</p> </blockquote> <p>I think he overstates, but that's OK. It's his democratization of creativity that interests me. But where is that democratization going with its stress on the invidual?</p> <p>Peter Korn's example of a Jackson Pollock "... Every choice the artist makes is a response to whatever previous mark he or she has made on the canvas, and so what you get as people painting a portrait of their intuition, of their interior self,..." I would have thought Pollock then as having created the penultimate selfie, but current trends with smart phones suggest Pollock didn't create the penultimate selfie. I'm curious as to where we go once the penultimate selfie is created. And wonder if it will come from a highbrows or the demos.</p> <p>As to what follows. Here's a movie. The Army (1944) on Hulu whose details should read: A family [not a widow] raises her sickly son to be strong enough to join the army and fight on the front lines. This is a Japanese film, WWII war propaganda. But as I watched it I couldn't help from feeling it was an intentionally anti-war film, I couldn't ask for a movie that artistically expressed a complete rejection of militarism for the effects of militarism's authoritarianism on a family. A mother whose duty is to raise a fit son and deliver him to his Majesty? But what it does portray, antagonistically or not, is the end of a way of life, and anyone watching today would see that film as anti-war and a marker for the beginning of the selfie in Japan, that a fair statement if it is fair statement to characterize 20th century art as an evolution of the selfie. Individualization followed destructive, malignant authoritarianism. Will, or has, individualization become destructive and malignant?</p> <p>Which brings me to the selfie's present form, the smart phone selfie, as the culmination of the central trend in 20th century art, democratized. Most of the selfies I view are taken by women. It is the artistic media, photography, not painting, not sculpture, literature or music, the latter dominated by men unlike now photography which is becoming the dominant form of women's own artistic self expression, democratized. In the selfie women define themselves, take control of their identity, reject authoritarism, though you may be a homemaker, though you may be a shoe maker, it is with your own camera that you as a woman give artistic expression which is creative "as such", greater as an artist than the majority of those whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.</p> <p>Rather than malignant, the selfie is reinvigorating self-expression and we are far from some final stage individualism's inexorable march. The selfie is constructive antagonism, creativity, in conversation with authority.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Here's another perspective from Peter Korn, author of Why We Make Things And Why It Matters, in an interview <a href="http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/06/06/podcast-117-what-craftsmanship-can-teach-us-about-the-good-life-with-peter-korn/">http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/06/06/podcast-117-what-craftsmanship-can-teach-us-about-the-good-life-with-peter-korn/</a></p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Peter Korn</strong>: For my generation what we very much saw craft as was an opportunity to be self-employed, self-expressive, self-sufficient and self-actualized. The obvious common word there being self, and thinking about this I then came to see that between the end of the 19th Century and the late e part of the 20th Century which is where I was practicing craft for the most part. The normative idea in our society of what an individual is, of what the self is, had changed radically. It had been changing a long time but it really changed quickly and radically in 20th Century, and the difference was that for all of human history the individual had thought of himself or herself as belonging to a larger social entity as sort of conceptualize the self you might say it’s like a finger on the hand.</p> <p>In the 20th Century we saw the rise of this idea of the individual as being fully autonomous and separate and individual and rational, and able to choose everything was choice, and instead of belonging to a society being shaped by it we started to see ourselves as being to pick and choose where in society we want, what ideas we like, and it was that idea of the fully autonomous individual that changed the way we approached craft so that another way to say this is that if you look at art over the millennia, art just tend to portrait a place where they think truth resides and so you’ve got a Greek Art portrayed this ideal of humanity outside of space and time in other words truth lay outside of humanity.</p> <p>You’ve got a lot of Christian art in the middle ages and the renaissance that portrayed scenes from the bible essentially, the idea being the truth resided in God’s kingdom, in the bible, as you know it’s expressed in the bible, again, outside of man. And then you’ve got the Hudson River School of Art in the 20th Century which portrayed nature and that went along with all sorts of enlightenment idea about the novel savage and so truth was thought to reside in nature, and then if you come into the 1940s for example our abstract expression as in you’ve got artist who are splattering paint or they’re painting abstract things where the panting take shape because every choice the artist makes is a response to whatever previous mark he or she has made on the canvas. Every choice the artist makes is a response to whatever previous mark he or she has made on the canvas, and so what you get as people painting a portrait of their intuition, of their interior self, so that we were out of place then where truth resides internally and it’s for us to discover as artist or as an individuals and bring forth to share with other people to very different concepts of what the individual is that has shaped my generation and subsequent generations.</p> </blockquote> <p>Which is Korn's historical view.</p>

<p>Fred I really like the idea that art is a sparkling dialog versus dialog at the Sparkletts water bottle in the office. Krista Tippett in her dialog with Rex Jung speaks to that point and here's a quote from the transcript of the interview <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/creativity-and-everyday-brain/transcript/1882">http://www.onbeing.org/program/creativity-and-everyday-brain/transcript/1882</a> </p> <blockquote> <p><strong >Ms. Tippett:</strong> Right, right, especially that useful part that's innovative and useful, and novel and useful. Another — so I was actually stunned and very excited about a <em>New Yorker</em> article recently that also said that this idea that we have about brainstorming as the best way to elicit creativity from a group of people and all the ground rules that go with that, about no questions, no judgment, that that in fact just has not now been proven not to be true, but that it's never held up scientifically. And I just want to ask you about that because you've studied creativity.<br> <strong >Dr. Jung:</strong> No, no. I do, and I get asked about that a lot. Well, what about brainstorming? It's like brainstorming is the worst thing you can do [laugh]. The main reason why is because of this process of trying out strange new ideas versus when you put people together in a room, almost invariably they will try to conform socially. So you will get creative ideas, but you won't get as creative when people are trying to please each other than when they're trying to push the envelope. And so the studies invariably show that the quality of the creative ideas that people put out individually are invariably higher in quality than those done in a group format. So another myth bites the dust. And again, I mean, there's always what about the writers of <em>Seinfeld</em> or <em>Saturday Night Live</em> or something like that? They work in group formats. Yeah, but it's different. I mean, they're — where you have collaboration like that, there's often an element of antagonism involved and critical interplay as opposed to cooperativeness.<br> <strong >Ms. Tippett:</strong> Right. So could we — could we state that with positive affect and say relationship [laugh]?<br> <strong >Dr. Jung:</strong> Yes.<br> <strong >Ms. Tippett:</strong> Which includes enough knowledge to be constructively antagonistic.<br> <strong >Dr. Jung:</strong> Yes, constructively antagonistic.<br> <strong >Ms. Tippett:</strong> It seems to me also, and this is a subtle point, but this feels important also, that the contrast to brainstorming where creativity can be demonstrated, there is still interaction. It's a funny thing because, with brainstorming, you have rooms full of lots of people and they're all spewing forth ideas, but they're not interacting. That article talked about some building at MIT where there were just all kinds of informal interactions and conversations that happened all the time, as you say, with people who got to know each other over time, so they could be asking interesting questions of each other. I just found it very comforting because it struck home. If felt like, yes, yes, that is how it works when it works.<br> <strong >Dr. Jung:</strong> It is, and it's more serendipitous. So you have Noam Chomsky at MIT rubbing shoulders with physicists and coming up with his …<br> <strong >Ms. Tippett:</strong> … kind of by accident, right? Just 'cause he happened to be in that building.<br> <strong >Dr. Jung:</strong> By accident, exactly. Because he's interacting with chemists and physicists and mathematicians by happenstance, he's able to think differently about his ideas. And that's one of the things about creativity, you know, getting what we call stovepiped. Having too narrow of a field of view really stifles creativity. So being able to broaden the horizons in that magical building at MIT, the name of which I can't remember …<br> <strong >Ms. Tippett:</strong> … I wrote it down. It's Building 20.<br> <strong >Dr. Jung:</strong> Building 20. OK, we'll call it Building 20 at MIT, that magical building where you could have this exchange of ideas and people running into each other and it's kind of cold and dingy and people didn't really want to be there.</p> </blockquote> <p>So David that interview is where I first came across the idea of constructive antagonism a couple of days ago. So what I like about the phrase is, in the conversational context in which she came up with it, she was moving away from the negative sounding words of Rex Jung. In the transcript, Jung agrees brainstorming doesn't lend itself to creativity, tend toward water cooler conversation, where a Seinfeld or SNL set instead has "...an element of antagonism involved and critical interplay as opposed to cooperativeness. "Krista Tippett immediately wishes for a softer phrasing, her emphasis on relatedness: <strong>Ms. Tippett:</strong> Right. So could we — could we state that with positive affect and say relationship [laugh]?" So to Tippett, antagonism by itself isn't pretty and prefers a coupling: offering us "constructively antagonistic." She marries Mars to Venus, and together they are more than the sum of their parts.</p> <p>David since you point it out, I can see where predator evisceration photography could be a creative response to the tyranny of cute that dominates the calendar market.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Working definition of creativity per Rex Jung [ <a href="http://onbeing.org/program/rex-jung-creativity-and-the-everyday-brain/1879/audio?embed=1">http://onbeing.org/program/rex-jung-creativity-and-the-everyday-brain/1879/audio?embed=1</a> ]: Some thing novel and useful, novel and useful within a social context. Antagonism not for antagonism's sake, but for the sake of <em>something, </em>which would be constructive antagonism.</p> <p>Can we have creativity in photography without constructive antagonism? Is it the case, or to what degree is it the case, that imitation only yields to creativity via a process involving constructive antagonism? Is a creative product in and of itself antagonistic constructively? If a photograph isn't antagonistic to a degree, is it imitative only? Imitation can be ultimately boring, as in group-think, mass manufacture, commodity production, etc.</p> <p>An example of one of my processings influenced by constructive antagonism. <a href="/photo/14524616">http://www.photo.net/photo/14524616</a> I'm so constructively antagonistic toward what I perceive to be an over emphasis on the eating habits of predators, hence, my exaggerated treatment of such. If it were conversational I would be saying, as part of a dialog with other bird photographers "Enough already." By which I would have meant "Why must the money shot be the kill?", although there are plenty of examples of bird photographers who don't emphasize eating. Even so, those other examples aren't necessarily also examples of constructively antagonistic treatments of a subject, may instead be primarily imitative.</p> <p>In your work, where does antagonism come into your process? Or in dialogs between photographers as they contributed to and advanced photography as an art form, as communicating novel and useful information within a social and historical context?</p> <p> </p>

<p>nm</p>

<p>The hexacopter put to use by Tom Mabe: <a href="

<p>Perhaps many feel that way because it's change and people generally don't like change. Not just change, but something new and something new is just 'one more thing.'</p> <p>I would love to make aerial shots of urban coyotes, especially when they go off to hide where I can't go. But when I would photograph them with equipment with no Z axis other than a tripod at the city water reclamation plant and its fenced surrounds, passers by a few times called the real police for my 'suspicious' activity. Had I been operating a camera on a drone flying over the plant and it's surrounds?</p> <p>Also, the long lens was limiting with rabbits, but rabbits can be pretty entertaining. They looked gorgeous when lofting through the low brush to escape approaching coyotes, I could just see flashes of their tails. Their multiple tails seem to land randomly so I imagine a coyote would be confused about where to run if in pursuit, looked like fish jumping in a lake in the right light, or random waves of bunny tails flashing. Awsome really, seeing how nature works to confuse a pursuer of social prey animals. With a drone I could be right there with it and have more than a few pixels of it? Sitting there outside the plant's fence fiddling with an electronic control unit and no visible drone I fear I would be seeing a lot more of the police, in this imagined instance, the police more agitated?</p>

<p>I wonder, the leg shapes are appealing, the skin texture is leathery and very real as opposed to being surreal. For being leathery it's more real to me anyway. I wonder too, if say his eroticism was in conversation with other portrayals of beauty, like the Marilyn Monroe types in contrast. ???</p>

<p>I took selfies in the 60's and 70's and growing up tried to photo bomb others' shots as much as was practicable.</p>

<p>But I doubt the now deceased hiker stopped to take his selfie with the grizzly!</p> <p>Donald's story sounds more familiar to me. I would have judged the chain link fence as scaled to keep me out and assumed the scale was the same for the animal on the other side, keeping it in as if it were another 'me'. But it's a different animal on the other side, and it may see the scale differently. At the San Diego Wild Animal Park the fences keep the grazing residents in, but at least initially the fences weren't scaled to keep the local mule deer out so the mule deer would come into the 'grass lands' area of that zoo.</p>

<p>Gerry "Without nuance or the lesson is lost..."</p> <p>Good point. </p>

<p>Sarah, Fred, I do think learning is much of it. For example, from my learning I'm tempted to first call something like bison woman's behavior stupid instead of just saying "I am dumbfounded." Saying she's stupid is a 'you statement', saying I'm dumbfounded is an "I" statement. Catch, notice, intervene, change. Catch myself, start noticing it, will to do differently, and change it. I have to notice I'm dumbfounded, catch myself, care enough to intervene and work with all that to change. NOT THAT EASY!!!!!</p> <p> </p>

<p>The lion Major "...did some double work for Clarence, the star lion of Daktari. Major lived to be twenty-three and spent his last few years at Magic Mountain in Saugus, California, where an average of 120 children a day had their photos taken on his back."<br /> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=VKS1-aBvXawC&pg=PT317&lpg=PT317&dq=clarence+the+lion+magic+mountain&source=bl&ots=0hY2n_h_Wd&sig=HfPCGgkRhCgjZ2zP1XsF6MiGWDY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDIQ6AEwA2oVChMI6sXu09CCxwIVRDmICh2VHgP7#v=onepage&q=clarence%20the%20lion%20magic%20mountain&f=false">https://books.google.com/books?id=VKS1-aBvXawC&pg=PT317&lpg=PT317&dq=clarence+the+lion+magic+mountain&source=bl&ots=0hY2n_h_Wd&sig=HfPCGgkRhCgjZ2zP1XsF6MiGWDY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDIQ6AEwA2oVChMI6sXu09CCxwIVRDmICh2VHgP7#v=onepage&q=clarence%20the%20lion%20magic%20mountain&f=false</a></p> <p>I had my administrative assistant's childhood photo of her on Major as my work screen saver for a few years. She looked ready to bolt off him, she said she didn't want to be in that photo. I saw Major for myself. When not posing with children, Major slept in the open on a shaded lawn behind a small white picket fence that I remember to have been less than 2 feet tall. That's where I saw him. He was old and worn out and exuded dignity. People walked by a few yards from him all day long.</p> <p>So how do we go from being a young girl with intact, healthy instincts superior to those of her parents (the child just knowing not to sit on a lion) to being a parent who, with instinct lost to them, would put their kid on a bison, or walk up to a brown bear to take a picture? How is it that instinct is lost? None of us can claim as our own the dignity of Major, so that loss is ours, we are all stupid in that regard.</p> <p>As to Einstein and the infinite. People can only be infinitely stupid in a universe that is infinite. That way they can take their finite collection of stupidity to an infinite number of places. But if Einstein was not certain that about the universe, he could be no more certain of the infinity of human stupidity. He said something glib, that's all. But I think there is more in the behaviors that are the subject of this thread that the word 'stupid' conceals because people don't want to think more deeply about it.</p> <p> </p>

For Cecil<div></div>

<p>Anders "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the biggest fool of all?"</p> <p>Doesn't quite work, Anders, because in the fairy tale the mirror surprisingly shows another that indeed is "fairer than the asker", according to the mirror the asker no longer the fairest. So in your adaptation, the mirror wouldn't reflect the asker any longer, would instead show a greater fool.</p> <p>Had she "got the shot" it would in my opinion have gone viral and the OP would have contained that link instead of the Robert Graves AP photo, nice as it is.</p> <p>Of course, there's metaphor in this a story broadly suggestive of our times, bison woman's behavior analogous to all of ours combined and along comes nature to offer what all should have known was coming, in doubt is with how much purchase and when.</p>

<p>From Laurie's link:</p> <blockquote> <p>An amendment by French MEP Jean-Marie Cavada, of the ALDE political grouping, which aimed to limit the "freedom of panorama" (a provision that permits taking images of buildings and art permanently located in a public place), was approved. The new text reads: “The commercial use of photographs, video footage or other images of works which are permanently located in physical public places should always be subject to prior authorisation from the authors or any proxy acting for them."</p> </blockquote> <p>Symbolic of the real interests of rights holders who by this "symbolism" show how they think about their property rights. Rights holders have competing interests, and the interests of rights holders may or may not align with public interest, public interest not being a primary concern of property rights holders. So if Google and Wikipedia join to conflict with the holders of some absurd "illumination branding" of a tourist trap, good for them. How as a European can one not feel demeaned by such nonsense?</p> <p>Illumination branding:</p> <p>From the Guardian linked to by Anders: "The illumination of the Eiffel Tower is considered to be a separate artistic installation." So that's how it works.</p> <p>Wow. That means if you keep changing the artistic lighting installation you have a perpetual copyright on the commercial use of images of a public building. Anyone else feel like something has been stolen in the artistic lighting installation 'process'? "<br /><br /></p>

<p>Alan I think I understand what you're saying. Some of the subject matter of a Walker Evans or Frank seems unrepresentative of the country as a whole. Growing up, however, my father rarely left the county in which he was born. His county was America as far as he knew, before good roads, before rural electrification and Evans, perhaps to some extent Frank, gave America a look at the America say that my dad grew up in, rural and undeveloped, that many wouldn't necessarily have known much about. I understand looking at some of those rural poverty images, the beat up structures, dirt and thinking it a world almost on a different planet. Yet at the same time, Walker Evans captured some street scenes from Selma that look inviting and homey to me, look very American, but to an outsider it may look pretty backward and run down. To me, America is first and foremost a run down house on a hot red clay hill where fenced in in the front yard is a huge sow with piglets nursing, all wallowing in hot mud on a hot day with structures of greying wood where the sow exudes 'stay away!'. Which looks like poverty in America: but who said that's poverty? It looks good to me and I wouldn't mind living like that. It's just from the outside it looks so poor, so un-American? But it doesn't look like that today...</p>

<p>Fred - "But a lack of self reflection, to me, doesn't mean a lack of presence."</p> <p>Good point.</p> <p>I also see this from the Popular Photography's editors in the duplicate thread Frank's "The Americans": 2 articles, today and 55 years ago (Thanking Marc for this link in that thread <a href="http://basepath.com/blog/PP-TheAmericans/">http://basepath.com/blog/PP-TheAmericans/</a> ):</p> <blockquote> <p>Yet all photographers are encouraged to make personal statements with their pictures. In the case of Robert Frank, one wonders if his pictures contribute to our knowledge of anything other than the personality of Robert Frank. - James M. Zanutto</p> </blockquote> <p>Zanutto takes a view of Frank contrary to mine where I don't see Frank's personality as much at issue.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Predisposed to, biased, or had a preference are better used than the word prejudice, though in using it I probably grabbed that word because Frank does come across in the article as having strong opinions.</p> <p>Another contrast to both of them is Avedon where he exposed his own interior when, say, photographing his dying father. With either Frank or Erwitt, did either in such a personal way as Avedon photograph something that said so personally "this is me and it's where I am with this"? Avedon when speaking to his dying father photographs had complex, layered feelings about it all. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=avedon+dying+father+picture&rlz=1T4NDKB_enUS521US521&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=5GqYVevwOIOOyASuoZ6oDw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1516&bih=1151">https://www.google.com/search?q=avedon+dying+father+picture&rlz=1T4NDKB_enUS521US521&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=5GqYVevwOIOOyASuoZ6oDw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1516&bih=1151</a></p> <p>I didn't get the sense from the Frank article that when Frank say took a photo exemplifying the Swiss that Frank was also putting across that he too was like the Swiss, and I don't know if he was or wasn't. Not to be overly general, or to be overly general: Avedon can seem very present in his own photos, Frank doesn't seem all that present in his, and Erwitt is definitely present which is why I enjoy them as much as I do I suppose.</p>

<p>Yeah it does show in their work and career paths, where what I like is hearing it in their own words, that each grappled with familiar issues and choices, art/career, managing expectations, etc. So about Erwitt I wonder whose voice he used when working, where I wonder less whose voice Frank expressed in his work. I like the work of each and consider that Frank explored what ran deep under the still waters pictured by Erwitt. Generally speaking I see Frank voicing another, less comprehensible aspect of what we are and Erwitt showing us more simply how we might prefer to be perceived. Is it from prejudice as to aspect of the subject matter best be presented, from prejudice that Frank would feel Erwitt as going the 'nonartist way'?</p> <p>By way of example, when a child I swam in what at the time was a segregated swimming pool at the end of the Jim Crow era. I didn't see the swimming pool as segregated and most of those I swam with were cousins of some kind or another. My other cousins of some kind or another just weren't present and I was scarcely aware that I was also related by blood to not a few of those children of field hands. It was a planter's swimming pool segregated by class/race. We were planters, they were hands, we white, they black. At the same time, we to an extent were literally family, some present, some not. My father glossed with sentimentality the troubling aspects of descending from those who had perpetrated crimes against humanity. He was motivated to write and his writing didn't ascend to art in part because he didn't take the inner journey that would have required of him to explore in his writing the deep waters of race, class, and identity in which he was seeped and stewed. My father had a story to tell, but it got the better of him and he couldn't tell it even to himself, for a lot of forgivable and painful reasons. Frank of those social conditions showed what all could see, though at the time many found it hard and morally challenging to look at it honestly, innervating, articulating, into every last detail of social and personal identity.</p>

<p>From the article: "His unwillingness to compromise led to breaks with friends like Erwitt. ‘‘I became a professional doing what people expected from me,’’ Erwitt says. ‘‘We all respected Robert’s talent and ability and knew he was difficult and fought with everyone — could be quite vindictive with some. We just dissolved the friendship. I felt he felt I’d gone the wrong way, the nonartist way.’’</p> <p>Sounds like Frank was kind of hard on the people around him. Anyway, Erwitt's quote gives me an impression of Erwitt where in his descriptions of his own art and methods, Erwitt was in those descriptions saying, after doing, what people expected of him.</p>