I TRULY BELIEVE THAT VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE, picture making wise:
"Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere...One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others." ~ John Szarkowski
Which is why I am a practitioner of what I call discursive promiscuity. Consequently, my picture making contest, as Szarkowski suggests, can be held anywhere. And, it can be the focus of any given referent. That is cuz my eye and sensibilities can be pricked by, seemingly, the most unconventionable referents. That is, referents outside of the box of what is considered to be referents appropriate for the making of a picture. However, no matter the referent, my pictures are most always about form. In a way, kinda like Robert Adams:
"By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet....Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil.... What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos."~ Robert Adams
All of the above written, coming back to Scarkowski's idea of "more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations", it took a comment from a gallery director who said, upon the viewing of my porfolio-which at the time was not divided into separate bodies of work-that no matter the diverse subject matter seen in my work, he would have no trouble identifying any of the pictures (when viewed as a stand-alone picture) as a product of my vision, which caused me to understand that the manner in which I pictured the world-that is, the identifiable configuration seen in all of my pictures-was the link which held all of the diverse referents together as a unified body of work. (My thanks to Hemingway for introducing the idea of run-on sentences as a writing divice)
That realization caused me to understand that promiscuous picture making was the way to go. After all, it would always be possible, long after the picture making fact, to harvest like-minded referent pictures from my total body of work and organize them, by specific referents, into separate bodies of work.
I recognize that this manner of picture making flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about picking a single subject / referent and concentrate on it, and it alone, for a protracted period of time in order to create a unified body of work. However, for me, when attempted, that mode of picturing leads me to a kind of picture making boredom which leads to a premature end of what I might have wanted to accomplish. What I have found from pursuing discursive promiscuity picture making is that I can add pictures, ad infinitum, to any number of separate bodies of work over a very long period of time.
In any event, I guess what I am suggesting in this entry is for giving it a try for a couple of months. Just picture anything and every thing and see what happens.
