#5578-80 / around the house ~ the joy of photography

post turkey day breakfast* ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

post turkey dinner ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

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"To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting...." ~ Dorothea Lange
"It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organising them...." ~ Elliott Erwitt

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO RESOLVE AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF WHY so many-the majority?-"serious" amateur picture makers seem to be unable to break out of the mold of making pictures that replicate what they have been told are good pictures.

Is it a lack of imagination? Creativity? A predisposition to "follow the leader", aka: "what I spoda do massa?" (that is, the "masters" of landscape / portraiture / et al). Or is it, quite simply, fear? The fear of being seen as "different" / non-conforming.

Add to the aforementioned, the idea of "visualization" (often refered to as pre-visualization. A concept promoted by Sir Ansel who wrote:

"Visualization is a conscious process of projecting the final photographic image in the mind before taking the first steps in actually photographing the subject....one of the most important concepts in photography.

iMo, visualization is the single most causal factor in the killing of creativity / responding to what you see without thinking. A process (without thinking) which, again iMo, results in pictures which surprise even their makers. Consider the words of Garry Winogrand:

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”

That idea is a big part of my over-arching approach to how I make pictures cuz there is nothing I enjoy more than being surprised by a picture I have made. For me, that is the Joy of Photography.



* breakfast at the newly installed retro breakfast nook in the Hobson household.

# 5570-77 / civilized ku•ku (landscape) ~ brain locked

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"I often find photos in the most ordinary places. Many of the subjects are nothing special either. They are just the beautiful things all around us that we don't make the effort to see truly … I believe that a spectacular photo of something ordinary is more interesting than an ordinary photo of something spectacular. The latter is about something else, the former is something else." ~ Jim Coe

THE WIFE AND I GOT WAY FOR A BIT to a little cottage on Blue Mountain Lake in the central Adirondacks. Since it is well into the off-season, we had the lake and village all to ourselves. Which was just how we had hoped it would be.

I realize I have beena bit of a slacker, posting wise, over the past little while. While I have been making lots of pictures, I seem to have developed a sorta brain lock, re: posting pictures without words. Which is what I have done-pictures with words-for the last 12-15 years.

Over those years I have offered for consideration a heap of thoughts, re: the medium and its appartatus. Lately, it seems there is little or nothing left for me to write about. And the last thing I want to do is to start repeating myself. So, I have been thinking about ways to get around this brain lock.

One idea is to start adding selected quotes from photographers from my huge "library" of found quotes. Most of those quotes were copied and pasted into my "library" cuz they tend to relect my ideas about the medium and its apparatus. And, interesting enough, quite often when I select a quote to use in an entry, that quote causes me to reflect upon it and, in doing so, I come with something to add to the expressed idea. So I'll probably give it a try.

#5567-69 / ku•natural world ~ ya see what ya wanna see

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APPARENTLY PATRICK KAVANAGH DID NOT HAVE a very high opinion of Irish policemen or at least of their artistic sensibilities....

"There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman." ~ Patrick Kavanagh*

Policeman aside, I believe I get the point Kavanah was trying to make....everyone does not "understand" art. And, I might add, I am somewhat sympathetic to his POV inasmuch as I subscribe to the idea that 50% of the planet's human population is, in fact, below average. A de facto condition which explains a lot of questionable goings on. However ....

....when it comes to "understanding" art, there is, iMo, a lot of room to move cuz even a confirmed dimwit squating amongst the classroom rubble of lunch buckets, golashes and spent spitballs can "appreciate" a piece of art based upon his/her simple "understanding" that he/she likes the color red or cute puppies or whatever. And, in that same classroom, an Academic Lunatic Fringe twit can put his/her "appreciatiation" and "understanding" into a 10,000 word blather composed of obtuse artspeak, flapdoodle and green paint. A writing that no one can understand.

Personally, I have always considered photographs to be a sort of Rorschach test, a belief which was reenforced by the words of the Rock Man (a character from the movie The Point):

"Say, babe, there ain’t nothing pointless about this gig. The thing is you see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig?

Then, of course, Susan Sontag had/has a few words to add to the conversation:

"Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy... The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness....Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease."

All of that written, my thoughts on the idea of "understanding" art, or specific piece of art, is that there is little to understand. What, iMo, is more important is how a particular piece of art makes a viewer feel. And, hopefully, if that viewer is a curious and thoughtful human being, he/she might strive to understand / identify how and why a particular piece of art instigates that experienced feeling.

* Irish poet and novelist, 1904-1967

# 5564-66 / still life•around the house ~ a ray of sunshine

Out of Context ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

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PLEASE EXCUSE MY ABSENCE FROM BLOGGING CUZ, OVER THE PAST WEEK, I HAVE BEEN preoccupied with hoping for a ray of sunshine to appear. My desire for a ray of sunshine was for a more figuative than literal ray of sunshine but I am more than pleased that my hoped for outcome appeared in both ways.

That written, I have, nevertheless, been making pictures, literal ray-of-sunshine wise, during the past week (as well as other referents). And, for one reason or another, a quote from John Szarkowski crepted into my mind:

"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. [...] The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer." - John Szarkowski

FYI, many might know of John Szarkowski as the legendary MOMA curator and photo critic but not be aware of the fact that he was a damn good picture maker. I have the book, John Szarkowski ~ Photographs, which is, iMo, an amazing retrospective of his work. In addition to the photographs, the book is interspersed with a significant amount of his personal correspondence which elucidates many of his ideas about the medium and its apparatus.

The book is so amazing that, in fact, if I were banished to a tiny desert island and allowed to take only one photo book, Szarkowski's book is the book I would take.

Very highly recommended.

# 5561-63 / around the house• civilized ku ~ times they are a-changing

saturday ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

sunday ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

monday ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

IT IS NOT JUST THE WEATHER THAT IS CHANGING, hopefully, tomorrow will bring a big change of another kind.

In his book, THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S EYE, John Szarkowski wrote:

"...Immobilizing these thin slices of time has been a source of continuing fascination for the photographer. And while pursuing this experience he discovered something else: he discovered that there was a pleasure and beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening. It had to do rather with seeing the momentary patterning of lines and shapes that had been previously concealed within the flux of movement. Cartier-Bresson defined his commitment to this new beauty with the phrase The Decisive Moment, but the phrase has been misunderstood: the thing that happens at the decisive moment is not a dramatic climax but a visual one....

He wrote that under the heading of TIME which was one of his five key elements of photography: The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time and Vantage Point. Later in the book in the section devoted to pictures which illustrate the idea of Time, he went on to write that the moment was...

"...decisive not because of the external event (the ball meeting the bat) but because in that moment the flux of changing forms and patterns was sensed to have achieved balance and clarity and order-because the image became, for an instant, a picture. "

When I first began making pictures, I did not have any conscious grasp of this definition of the idea of The Decisive Moment. Yet, nevertheless, I was unconsciously pursuing it. That it, in fact, was what defined my way of seeing / vision. And it was not untill a number of years later, that I finally consciously pieced together the connection of this idea with my way of seeing.