pet gate ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone
reds ~ (embiggenable) • µ4/3
In an entry on Jörg M. Colberg's site, CONSCIENTIOUS PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE, is his essay, Christopher Anderson and the Joy of Seeing. iMo, it's a good read inasmuch as the opinion expressed is much in line with my feelings, re: the medium and its apparatus ....
.... at its very core photography should be about the excitement of experiencing in the medium’s particular form the end result of having truly seen something or someone. It’s not just about looking, and it’s also not about recognizing — it’s about seeing, about discovering. And that excitement, that joy can simply come from what the camera does itself, when it’s being used under the right circumstances, by the right person — the right person here the one who directly taps into her or his visual cortex.
In describing the pictures in Christopher Anderson's book, Colberg writes, "The work itself, these sublimely beautiful pictures, demand to be taken for what they are: they are all about the joy of looking, the joy of making beautiful pictures. That’s it."
As a set up to Colberg's above commentary, Colberg takes a shot at narrative-driven photography ...."In the case of photography that doesn’t fall into the category of narrative-driven work, this would appear to be a widely accepted statement: you don’t want to look at lousy pictures. How or why so many photographers interested in narrative-driven work somehow appear to have forgotten this aspect of photography is not clear to me .... [T]here’s nothing more tedious for me than to make my way through some interesting story that is told with mediocre or lousy pictures."
Over the past 15 years, I have spent a lot of virtual ink writing about the same topic. Some might say that I have spent too much ink nattering on about the topic, so I'll stop right here.
That written, in my next entry I will address what I consider to be the most difficult challenge in picture making.