OK - Dinesh - from the positive standpoint (you've heard enough of my negative perspective already - everybody has) - my philosophical
approach to photography is NOT to market stereotypes of what people think is supposed to be appealing in nature, but to try to photograph and print things in such a manner as to bring them into the perception of beauty they normally wouldn't ever notice themselves. Yes, sometimes this is something on grand scale, but more often requires some real contemplation). The print should lead them in, and involve
them for months and years, and keep rewarding, until they finally understand why I took it. Let's put it another way. I'm the world's harshest critic of my own work. If I can stand one of my own prints up on the wall for more than a few month, I consider it a relative success. But I will openly admit that I feel continuity with the whole West Coast school of emphasizing fine printmaking. How can one communicate precisely if they don't even have a fine-tuned instrument. I cut my teeth on color printing before I even attempted black and white, but now I do both. I could care less about fame and fortune. It is nice to generate some extra cash from time to time. Large format
shooting and printing isn't cheap by any means, and yeah, I've had a few brief moments in the sun, so to speak, my deserved five minutes
of fame. I have a "been there, done that, so what" attitude toward that kind of thing. What I do want to accomplish is to live in the light,
the subtleties of natural evanescent natural light and beauty, uncover hidden details, maybe help others to see them. Many many times I
get people walking up curious and ask to look under the darkcloth of my 8x10. It takes them a bit to get accustomed to the dim upside-down image. But then, suddenly, there's a revelation: "Why didn't I see that". Well, they wouldn't have unless I have framed it for them,
first with my groundglass, then in a picture frame. That is an utterly different approach, both as vision and craft, than just hunting for a
background for a marketable stereotype, and then making some amateurish inkjet of it, expensive only because it's huge and properly
mounted for that kind of application. And it's about respect for the subject matter, not about slathering it with fluorescent finger paint just
to make it more appealing to interior decorators of some Scarface movie set. (Sorry, I'm getting sarcastic again). More later, perhaps...
perhaps not. But this is what I'm after - not to put down someone just because of who they are - but to agitate a contrast in the purpose
for all this. There is nothing wrong with just going out and doing whatever for fun, however. Photography is like that. But here we're dealing
with pretensions to art. I don't even like the term "art" in a photographic context. But as a marketing term, it certainly exists, and is certainly abused from time to time.