(embiggenable) • iPhone
(embiggenable) • iPhone
(embiggenable) • iPhone
(embiggenable) • iPhone
YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF REALLY BAD ADVICE / IDEA, re: making pictures:
"One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better."
This quote comes from a well known natural world / landscape picture maker (now departed) who made pictures with heaping doses of art suace. That should come as no surprise given the impoverished sentiment expressed in his quote which might be summed up as "reality bites". A sentiment which drove him to make pictures, not in pursuit of illustrating and illuminating the true character of the natural world, but rather, that were caricatures-a comically or grotesquely exaggerated representation of (someone or something)-of that world.
That written, if one were to search in the right places, one could find many examples of good advice / ideas which stand in direct contradiction to the preceeding quote:
"Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself." - Berenice Abbott
"Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary’, for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty." - Alvin Langdon Coburn
It should be obvious-to those who have followed this blog for any length of time-on which side of this dichotomy I come down on. However, for those who land on the same side as I do, there is another cautionary quote to consider:
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." ~ H.L. Mencken
I have uttered this quote-changing the word "intelligence" to the word "taste"-many times to explain the salivating admiration of the majority of the public for art-sauced pictures of the natural world. Mencken's quote is well worth heeding if one wishes to engage in the sale of pictures of the natural world cuz it's a fact that cheesey, over-wrought, art sauce laden pictures of the natural world are what sells.