Sat May 22, 2010 11:09 am
You would not find it easy getting a show in a reputable gallery with over processed images, contemporary art photography has an everyday like appearance with the world, it's subtle, understated, meditative. That for me as always been what the best photographic art has been about-which is not the same as other arts. The greater the artistic license in photography the less photographic it becomes; A photograph may not be the actual thing itself, but it's evidence of it, for it to work you have to have faith in what you're seeing. We know that the world isn't black and white, nor does it simply fit in to a little box, but photography came to be in a time where the study of nature and science was an obsession, where new technology like photography proved that all a horses legs left the ground at the same time while galloping. Revealed the lines in a hand or a face in a way that a painting never could ("This mortal enemy of art") allowed the poor to know what their ancestors looked like for the first time.
Since photography's birth it's been used as a means of study. to record what it finds before it, sometimes in great detail. sometimes not, but always with the intention of highlighting something that the maker believes to have intrinsic value, I stress the word intrinsic because the best photography is subject driven and a good subject clearly & simply defined really is a thing of wonder. If a person chooses the medium of photography as their art, by and large it is because of the properties and qualities that are inherent in photography. It's why people like William Eggleston, Stephen shore, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Robert Frank, Gene Smith and countless others (including Ansel Adams) chose photography as their art. Photography's relatively short history in the arts is littered by those who forgot or didn't' realise what made photography special. By and large they have been forgotten or seen to be wrong or as footnote to abandoned practices like pictorialism
I can't recall which painter said this and I'll paraphrase "I'd give up all the paintings of Jesus for one photograph of him"
What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling? -
W. Eugene Smith