Category: Photography

I've never submitted work to a "call for artists" but recently one caught my attention and so I've prepared a proposal to display two panoramic images taken in the same location in different seasons and presented as canvas triptychs.

The idea is to explore the idea of "beauty" as it exists in a portion of a landscape at a particular moment in time and, when the pieces are considered together, "beauty" as exhibited by the same landscape at unique and very different moments in time.

The two images are "Spring Trees, Wallkill River," and "Spring Ice, Wallkill River," (gallery numbers 2283 and 2256, respectively.)

See what you think…

 

I came across this wonderful quote by E.B. White, the writer best known for books like "Charlotte's Web" and the classic writing guide, "Elements of Style":

Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

I read an interesting essay in the NY TIMES yesterday about UK Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to measure how happy his constituents feel.

Not surprisingly, Cameron's program has been met with a share of skepticism, even ridicule. However, the author of the piece, Roger Cohen, observes that it's no secret that money alone does not buy happiness.

Cohen writes: "…  the case for trying to measure the happiness of a society, rather than its growth and productivity alone, has become compelling. When Western industrialized societies started measuring gross domestic product, the issue for many was survival. Now most people have enough — or far more than enough by the standards of human history — but the question remains: “What’s going on inside their heads?"

"Starting next month, the government will pose the following questions and ask people to respond on a scale of zero to 10: How happy did you feel yesterday? How anxious did you feel yesterday? How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?"

"… Andrew Oswald, a happiness economics expert at the University of Warwick, suggested the questions were a good start… The important thing, he argues, it to shift “from the concept of financial prosperity to the idea of emotional prosperity.” Perhaps that’s the 21st-century indicator we need: gross emotional prosperity, or G.E.P."

The Brits mention intangibles like "nature" "birdsong" "the environment" "open spaces" and "clear air" as having a significant impact on their happiness.  Cohen concludes that "…These moments were linked to nature, to finding time, to feeling the transcendent power of the human spirit."

It seems the challenge in this day and age is finding time….

 

"Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the pond,

where whole generations of biological processes

are boiling beneath the mud.

Reeds speak to you of the natural world:

they whisper, they sing.

And herons pass by.

Are you old enough to appreciate the moment?

Too old?"
                                                                            Eleanor Lerman

 

I recently came across some thoughts I'd recorded in response to an interview for a trade publication and thought they were worth sharing here.  The last question the interviewer asked was about the general state of fine-art photography and here is my response:

"It is a tremendously exciting time to be a photographer!  Not since the introduction by George Eastman of the Brownie camera has the photography world evolved so quickly.  The medium (and the technology that is allowing this evolution) is changing in ways that we cannot begin to predict.  However, one thing will never change: our response to art – painting, photography, poetry,music – independent of it's genesis.  It may be a product of a new way of creating it but the ability of any work of art to evoke or provoke a response will always be independent of the means by which it was created."

I read about an exhibit that has just opened at the Dorsky Museum on the campus of SUNY New Paltz and the comments the artist made struck a chord:

Marco Maggi said that he, for one, does not believe nor will his audience believe that “art is only about ideas — that there is some hidden, complex idea that is so intellectual that few can understand it. No, not at all.”

“The main issue in this show is surfaces. Our surfaces, how superficial they are. I hope, if anything that I can help encourage people to look, give a second glance…"

As an apologist for the beauty of physicality and it's primacy over, or at least congruent to "conceptual art", I enjoy when artists disavow or give secondary status to the intellectual component of their art.

At the end of the day the question one has to answer is "Does the art have heart?"

 

 

Earlier I wrote about how a scene framed by the camera's viewfinder is a distillation of reality.

What I am thinking as I look through the viewfinder is: "What do I include in this scene so that it naturally resolves itself within the frame?" If I am successful, the resulting image, though derived from the larger world, is independent of the reality from which it has been plucked.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to further elaborate on how, exactly, one makes this happen, except to say that I pay close attention to the edges and corners of the frame and sometimes even blur my vision while looking through the viewfinder to see if, in that blurry state, the scene makes sense visually.

I'll change the framing slightly to allow the scene to "resolve" itself — I can see this and "feel" that it makes visual sense — but I can't say exactly how that happens. Since each scene is different, I'm not sure there is a formula one can apply, though the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson described the process as:

"… putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.”

Indeed.

I recently visited the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida where one of the shows on display was "Romantics to Moderns, British Watercolors and Drawings."

The introduction to the show noted that:

 "As the topographic view and observation of nature began to be replaced by the artist's interpretation of landscape convention in an actual locale there was an increasing interest in expressing emotion and an inner personal vision which are closely associated with the literary and artistic movement of Romanticism." [emphasis mine]

Photography at this time (last half of the 19th century) was influenced by the same aesthetic (called Pictorialism) and it was as a counterpoint that the f/64 photo group was formed, it's most notable members being Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. These photographers sought to produce what they termed "straight" photography, absent the affectation of the Pictorialists.

Though they succeeded in defining a new aesthetic in photography, one can make the case that the resulting images continue to express emotion and an inner personal vision but in a fashion unique to the artists and the medium of photography.

One has to ask, doesn't all artwork ultimately express emotion and an inner personal vision?