Brandon D.
Member
The people who care what "photography" is are the ones who look at a photograph and take the mental journey to connect the photograph with something in the real world. This journey is not something worth doing with paintings, drawings, or digi-graphs because they don't offer an indexical relationship between subject and picture. Photographs (uniquely!) do offer this indexical relationship.
It is perfectly legitimate to embrace pictures at first reading and accept them as a beguiling pattern of marks on a plane surface. Suspending enquiry, suspending disbelief is a pleasant entree to a comfortable world of fictions were "seeming" is indistinguishable from "being".
Photography is a ticket out of this world.
I think that's just one way of looking at it.
I agree with the "Who cares?" mentality of looking at it, NOT necessarily within the context that "photography and its meaning doesn't matter" but just that "I don't care what other people think it is [for]." An award winning novelist can right a darn good novel without caring what I (or anyone else) personally thinks of novel writing.
The other thing I think that gets overlooked is that photography can be used as a means to other artistic expressions. IMHO, people who are using photography (as a step/springboard) to produce work that looks more-so computer generated (or whatever) have an artistic right to their own point of view about photography (e.g,. Erik Almas not only shoots old school, large format style but he also produces work that looks more like graphic art). Where any individual person wants to take their photography is their business. And, I don't think "ideological/semantic wars" need to break out just because everyone has their own view of what photography should be.
I just think my work (and everyone else's) should speak for itself, without the need for battles about definitions, categorizations, and abstract explanations. I have a sense of what photography means to me, and whether or not anyone else agrees with that sense is quite irrelevant.
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