TheFlyingCamera
Membership Council
If you distill down all that artspeak I spewed, it actually makes quite a bit of sense, especially in light of Stieglitz' photos. He photographed those clouds, trying to capture on film some emotional response he had to seeing them. Even the titles are just suggestive symbols for what he felt, since you can't transmit an emotional response in a single word (or even a dictionary's worth). Words themselves are NOT feelings, and neither are pictures. We rely on the assumption that someone else will have a common experience with us when looking at the same subject. This is of course a false assumption, but a necessary one. If we could not rely on that assumption being logically valid a majority of the time, communication between two people would be impossible.
A case in point -the color white. In western cultures, white is the color of weddings and celebrations. It represents purity. In Asian cultures, white is the color of death and mourning. If I were to photograph someone wearing all white, most westerners would look at it and think of positive events - weddings, First Communion, christenings, cocktail parties. Someone from China would look at it and wonder where's the funeral. Abstract this out to the notion of language - since the written (or even the spoken) word is an artificial idea, entirely man-made, why does the letter "e" HAVE to have the sound we associate with it? Monty Python spoofed this in a way when in a skit, a man walks into a store and tells the clerk, "My name is Snarglevarglebingbangbong"(or something like that, I can't remember the exact name), to which the clerk replies, "how do you spell that?" and he says, "S-M-I-T-H".
All language really is is grunts,whistles and clicks coming out of our mouths, and scratches and squiggly lines on a piece of paper. It has no actual reality - it only means something because we agree that "camera" means a camera.
The same is true of photographs - we have a common acceptance of what the photograph means because we have to in order to be able to interpret it. Like looking at a cloud, though, you can see a racecar and I can see Pam Anderson in a bikini in that cloud. When we have that big of a disconnect, we can't arrive at a common meaning.
A case in point -the color white. In western cultures, white is the color of weddings and celebrations. It represents purity. In Asian cultures, white is the color of death and mourning. If I were to photograph someone wearing all white, most westerners would look at it and think of positive events - weddings, First Communion, christenings, cocktail parties. Someone from China would look at it and wonder where's the funeral. Abstract this out to the notion of language - since the written (or even the spoken) word is an artificial idea, entirely man-made, why does the letter "e" HAVE to have the sound we associate with it? Monty Python spoofed this in a way when in a skit, a man walks into a store and tells the clerk, "My name is Snarglevarglebingbangbong"(or something like that, I can't remember the exact name), to which the clerk replies, "how do you spell that?" and he says, "S-M-I-T-H".
All language really is is grunts,whistles and clicks coming out of our mouths, and scratches and squiggly lines on a piece of paper. It has no actual reality - it only means something because we agree that "camera" means a camera.
The same is true of photographs - we have a common acceptance of what the photograph means because we have to in order to be able to interpret it. Like looking at a cloud, though, you can see a racecar and I can see Pam Anderson in a bikini in that cloud. When we have that big of a disconnect, we can't arrive at a common meaning.