Lots of you are old enough to remember the obligatory visit we had to make to someone's house back in the 60s/70s to see the vapid home movies of their recent trip to who cares.
Rarely was there enough liquor to get us through the first reel and god help us there were 3 more to go.
Ok so lately I've been wandering through the gallery here, spewing out comments on some of the work, which takes very very little liquor to get through. Some of it's excellent. I mean really really good.
But something I was noticing was the titles which I bitched about before. But this is sort of different. And it dawned on me why some of it bothered me. When I look at a picture I do the zen mind/beginner mind thing, which is initially just look at the picture and let it talk to me. Just receive it. See what it says. And absorb that. Then after that I do the active mind thing. I analyze it. What could be better, could a crop work, could more burning and dodging work. Which by the way is another bitch I have. If it's a gallery of work, why on earth do we have scans of negatives, and not finished retouched prints. Paraphrasing Ansel's words, "thanks for showing the the score, but I paid to hear the performance." Practice on you own time.
But anyway, back to the gallery. What bothers me is a couple of things. One is when someone was shooting something and they have an idea in their head and then they print it and show it, and they stick to the idea in their head, even thought the picture no longer shows that. A bad example: A photographer witnesses someone beating the shit out of someone, so they take out their camera and try to record it. By the time they get the shot the person is laying on the ground bleeding and the guy is walking away. And the shot shows a stranger bending down to help the guy. So the photographer makes a print and since he witnessed the scene he entitles it "Man's inhumanity to man". Except it sucks. Because the print doesn't show that to the view, it clearly shows, "The Good Samaritan". Someone leaning down to help.
The problem is the photographer is sticking to his initial witnessing, and emotional state of mind of the attack, and not to an evaluation of what the actual picture says to the viewer.
I see that in a number of pictures there. The mental state of what the photographer thought he shot, contrasted with what is actually shown. Two different things. I guess the photographer could say, yeah but that's not what I was feeling. Ok, well what you were feeling is sort of irrelevant to what you actually showed, so maybe you should accept the serendipitous magic of what you have here and celebrate it.
The other bitch I have is what I'll call travelogue pictures or postcards. The "here is my shot of such and such a bridge, or fountain, or church" or whatever, but what I find rather humorous, is a response of, "hey I passed through there last week".
The whole point of fine art (usually) black and white photography is to convey an emotion. The surrealism inherent in black and white is an alignment of the stars, that black and white pictures just have the capacity to reek of emotion. So when people name their pictures, Bobs Beach, or Big Ass Church, or whatever, they are immediately taking the viewer from an emotional state to an intellectual or analytical one. The exact thing a postcard does."Hey I should go there sometime." But the exact opposite of what a fine art picture should be doing.
In my opinion even a great fine art picture will drop like a rock the second, someone takes the viewer away from an emotional experience inside the picture to a dumbass description of where the hell the place is. I don't care about your travel budget, give me some bloody emotion. Move me, talk to me, but don't describe to me what your passport says.
It's like showing you Migrant Mother, then telling you it's an actress, gearing up for her scene in "I'm an Okie from Muskogee".
Immediate buzzkill.
Rarely was there enough liquor to get us through the first reel and god help us there were 3 more to go.
Ok so lately I've been wandering through the gallery here, spewing out comments on some of the work, which takes very very little liquor to get through. Some of it's excellent. I mean really really good.
But something I was noticing was the titles which I bitched about before. But this is sort of different. And it dawned on me why some of it bothered me. When I look at a picture I do the zen mind/beginner mind thing, which is initially just look at the picture and let it talk to me. Just receive it. See what it says. And absorb that. Then after that I do the active mind thing. I analyze it. What could be better, could a crop work, could more burning and dodging work. Which by the way is another bitch I have. If it's a gallery of work, why on earth do we have scans of negatives, and not finished retouched prints. Paraphrasing Ansel's words, "thanks for showing the the score, but I paid to hear the performance." Practice on you own time.
But anyway, back to the gallery. What bothers me is a couple of things. One is when someone was shooting something and they have an idea in their head and then they print it and show it, and they stick to the idea in their head, even thought the picture no longer shows that. A bad example: A photographer witnesses someone beating the shit out of someone, so they take out their camera and try to record it. By the time they get the shot the person is laying on the ground bleeding and the guy is walking away. And the shot shows a stranger bending down to help the guy. So the photographer makes a print and since he witnessed the scene he entitles it "Man's inhumanity to man". Except it sucks. Because the print doesn't show that to the view, it clearly shows, "The Good Samaritan". Someone leaning down to help.
The problem is the photographer is sticking to his initial witnessing, and emotional state of mind of the attack, and not to an evaluation of what the actual picture says to the viewer.
I see that in a number of pictures there. The mental state of what the photographer thought he shot, contrasted with what is actually shown. Two different things. I guess the photographer could say, yeah but that's not what I was feeling. Ok, well what you were feeling is sort of irrelevant to what you actually showed, so maybe you should accept the serendipitous magic of what you have here and celebrate it.
The other bitch I have is what I'll call travelogue pictures or postcards. The "here is my shot of such and such a bridge, or fountain, or church" or whatever, but what I find rather humorous, is a response of, "hey I passed through there last week".
The whole point of fine art (usually) black and white photography is to convey an emotion. The surrealism inherent in black and white is an alignment of the stars, that black and white pictures just have the capacity to reek of emotion. So when people name their pictures, Bobs Beach, or Big Ass Church, or whatever, they are immediately taking the viewer from an emotional state to an intellectual or analytical one. The exact thing a postcard does."Hey I should go there sometime." But the exact opposite of what a fine art picture should be doing.
In my opinion even a great fine art picture will drop like a rock the second, someone takes the viewer away from an emotional experience inside the picture to a dumbass description of where the hell the place is. I don't care about your travel budget, give me some bloody emotion. Move me, talk to me, but don't describe to me what your passport says.
It's like showing you Migrant Mother, then telling you it's an actress, gearing up for her scene in "I'm an Okie from Muskogee".
Immediate buzzkill.
