# 5900-04 / quotidian ubiquity ~ a milk cow is not a helicopter and that's a fact

July 28, 2021

(Not so) RANDOM THOUGHTS

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words. ~ Elliott Erwitt

Every artist I suppose has a sense of what they think has been the importance of their work. But to ask them to define it is not really a fair question. My real answer would be, the answer is on the wall. ~ Paul Strand

The funny and sad thing is that photography is an art, but these guys have such an inferiority complex about it that all they do is tag on gold-plate words where they aren’t needed. If they’d only let it talk for itself ~ Gordon Parks

I have been involved with the medium of photography and its apparatus for ever so slightly more than half a century. During the first 30 years (approximately) I made pictures-primarily but not exclusively-for the purpose of commerce, aka: advertising, marketing, editorial, and corporate communications. During the last 20 years (approximately) I have been making pictures for the purpose of making Art. As an adjunct to that more recent picture making, I have written over 5 gazillion (approximately) words, re: the medium and its apparatus.

Most of those written words were (or should been) considered as my thinking out loud wherein I was trying to find answers to several questions that were ricocheting around the confines of my skull....questions such as, what is a photograph?, why do I make photographs?, what is the "right" way to look at photographs (mine or those made by others?, can a photograph have meaning beyond the visual?, amongst many other questions.

In addition to thinking out loud about such questions, I have also read a gazillion (or more) words-I have book shelves chock full of books-written by others who have expressed their ideas / answers to such questions. The one thing the books all seem to have in common is that they raise as many questions as they do answers. That's cuz it seems obvious to me (at this point) that virtually all of the answers to such questions are a matter of personal opinion. That is, kinda like trying to find the answer to the question, what is art?

All of the above written, my thinking out loud about such questions has resulted in a few answers (for me) that, iMo, can be summed up by the (not so) random thoughts presented at the top of this entry. Or, in my words....when employed by an open-minded practioner for the making of Art, the medium and its apparatus is capable of creating a thing (a print) which is, iMo, a piece of visual Art which is at its best; 1) when, iMo, it is perceived as a delight to the sense of sight, not, iMo, as an intellectual construct, and, 2) when, iMo, it exploits the medium and its apparatus' intrinsic charateristic as a cohort of the real.

And, to be perfectly blunt, I am sick unto tears with picture makers who try to convince, or is it "con, me into thinking-by means of gold-plated words or a sticky slathering of art suace-that a picture of a milk cow is a delightful picture of a helicopter when, in fact, I can plainly see that it is an un-delightful picture of a milk cow.