IMO, the internet, more specifically chat rooms are NOT set up to deal with difficult, dense, and often provoking text. Reading criticism is very important to me, however conversing about theses topics,, when not in person, is like a free for all of "badness" coming down the s%*t-hole. ITS a bad thing to bring up these writers and their books that they have brilliantly written. If you do read them, keep it to yourself. if you have found it enlightening, keep it to yourself. Sharing this enlightenment with other people, makes other people feel "less than" and makes you sound pompous, elitist, and VERY HIGH BROW, snooty. I always suggest keep your mouth shut and keep walking'! Share only on a need to know basis. If you absolutely need to share and discuss criticism, art theory, philosophy, ---Share with a private e-mail of a trusted friend, who has intimated that he/she is also interested in "said" topic.
The only way to break the cycle you're talking about is to yes, indeed, SHARE what you learn. Fight the rising tide of anti-intellectualism. Read something, ask questions (in public!), answer them if you can for others, and let them know about where you got the idea and why you care about it. Yes, internet forums are an at best awkward place to have these discussions, but hiding discussions of ideas away in private chats just to make some people feel better about themselves because they're not being challenged is only to perpetuate the idea that ideas and critical thinking are somehow "elitist", "snooty" and "pompous". I grew up with what I always thought of as a reasonable vocabulary, and when I got out of college and met some people who were perturbed by my use of words that had more than two syllables, I realized that it's actually quite substantial. But instead of thinking that I'm trying to make them feel dumb by using words that they're not familiar with, my actual feeling is the opposite - I'm using my natural language and vocabulary to communicate an idea, and I'm using complex vocabulary because I actually think you're smart enough to understand it. If you're not familiar with a word or an idea, there's a thing called a dictionary - use it. If you don't want to look up words you don't understand, I don't think you're stupid - I think you're lazy, which is the much bigger sin.
but it's all in how you speak to them. Act arrogant and demeaning, and they'll clam up.
Wrong thread - this is the NON-technical discussion
+!
I do not dumb down my language and my writings for the general public, only for children. If someone is too lazy to look up words [high light the word, right click to copy, open a new tab, go to www.google,com, past, carriage return, read, duh how hard is that????] I have no sympathy. I look up slang and colloquialism from poster who are in other parts of the world.
"What Photography Is" begins as a critique of Barthe's "Camera Lucida" and ends up being a somber interpretation of the medium. It focuses on photography not as art or on its vernacular function in supporting memory and emotion, but as being a medium that allows us to perceive things that normally do not register via our human visual system. Technical photography such as that produced in photographing nuclear explosions, photomicrographs, etc., is discussed. Elkins not only dwells upon what is normally impossible for us to see, but also what is impossibly hard to look at.
What's more, all the professional artists I know take academic theory rather seriously, and few or perhaps even none would suggest that theorising and thinking hard has no impact on the final works they make.
I agree with the other parts of your post, but navel gazing and disappearing up your own backside wont improve a natural instinct to press the shutter for a given composition.
I think you're quite mistaken in suggesting that photography is such a broad medium as to defy academic discussion.
I didn't say it defied academic discussion. I said it defied universal generalizing. Maybe your artist friends take it seriously, but not all photographers are artists. Many years ago I was a student intern at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and I'm pretty sure that the analysis I was doing to the photos on my desk was different from what your friends do. Was Sontag going to help me suss out tiny fluctuations in brightness of quasar images? Or understand what they mean?
What Susan Sontag knew about photography, you could write on the back of a fag packet.
You're muddling two things, there's photography from a technical aspect (as another photographer) and photography from a (non photographer) viewers perspective. Sontag's work is dated now but mostly still valid, as is John Berger's.
You don't need to be a composer or musician to listen to music, but you can comment and write about it in a very valid way, that's all Sontag is doing.
Ian
Sontag's work is dated now but mostly still valid
But I don't mean from a technical aspect, but from an aesthetic aspect.
Anyone can read the aesthetic, Sontag's partner is in the business and a well known photographer. She's talking about generalities though not individual images.
Maybe you need t re-read.
Ian
How did photographers get along before there was all this theory? Hard to imagine now.
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