Athol, Massachusetts 9 May 2009
The abstract has always had a strong appeal to me. I sometimes think that photography is best served by photo-artist who see this genre well. For me, it is a kind of training ground for my eye -- to see shapes and forms and how they interact on the two dimentional surface of a print. I also lean more toward a monotone print for abstracts because it takes the image one step further away from reality. Let me say here that I believe there is no reality in art, period. With color, we tend to see it more as a representation of what was actually there. It doesn't matter whether the colors are true to the original scene or not, viewers generally accept colors as real. To most people, photographs are about memories of things and places. To me, the photo artist, it is about the emotional experience of the moment. I want the viewer to have some measure of what I felt when I made the image.
2 comments:
It seems a few photoblogs recently have touched on the "photo-artist" and reality lately.
I feel pretty strong about for the simple reason that what I perceive as real, the next person may not.
What is real for you in one instant of time immediately becomes unreal a fraction of a second later. A photograph may be evidence of an event, a happening, a thing that happened during a specific moment, but it will forever be a moment in the past. Reality is now, this instant, everything else is memory. Photographs are equivalents, and not the real thing. Once you get past the unrealness of it all, it's kind of liberating.
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