My first set of two sets of ten. I hesitate and shudder at starting with something so elementary and ubiquitous as ‘photography is painting with light’. Some have experimented with the idea of a photograph making itself without the intervention of a person, but I personally don’t think that is possible, for even just the set up of a system of tools that can attempt to accomplish such a task is already an intervention, regardless of how minimal. In my classical view, which I adhere to, a painting, like a photograph, is a two dimensional representation of something else, whether or not the artist has piled on the paint three inches or more deep, or has added barndoors to it. I still like to think of it as flat and two-dimensional. I am fond of sticking to a true, or perhaps established, definition of a word, but am by no means conventional, at least I don’t think so. I did some painting in High School and loved it, but Photography blew me away, and I stuck with it. I still have a nostalgic future vision of myself standing in front of an easel in some idyllic country house, but no country has yet convinced me that it’s the right place for me to settle, what with all the brutal and violent colonialist and imperialist histories, at least in the countries whose languages I know, but I wander.. I am delighted that Tamara Gayer invited me to join this group, and have enjoyed every day since. There have been times where I thought to myself, what is this someone thinking by posting “this” image? Have they not read the concept or been following the trends? Only to stand back and try to really see what that person was conveying. I have learned a lot and enjoyed a lot, and it’s quite a task to narrow it down to a few favorites. Even then, I will surely miss a few simply due to the sheer numbers, or to the many, including mine that were shared rather than posted. For my practice in this particular genre, and since I am a wistful wishful painter, I seek to find interesting involuntary convergences of objects, surfaces, and light, all of which exist all around us, and to actually make a photo-painting out of them. It is quite a difficult task to take something like a two-dimensional photograph and really make it two-dimensional, for it is second nature for us to translate a 2-D image of a three-dimensional world into a perceived 3-D image. Photography is so adept at capturing the nuance of bended light across the carrosserie of a shiny car that it’s impossible for our mind to flatten it. Therefore, I am constantly seeking to reduce the amount of shutter releases per day, which can number in the several hundreds, by finding those subjects where this flattening may be more possible. What I see in the postings here, are two genres, photographs of Involuntary Paintings, and photographs that ARE Involuntary Paintings. To me, they’re both an homage and a manifestation of the hunt and of the capture, of seeing, interpreting and recording and then re-interpreting and then sharing. Shall we say “Social Media” in the true sense of the word? For this exercise, I was loath to go through all the “available” posted images, but once I started I couldn’t stop and went through all. At first, I thought TEN was way too many, but by the end, I had a very difficult time narrowing it down. There are way too many luscious jaw-droppers. There are also a few people whose contributions I like are too numerous, but will only select one from each person. I am also going to post TWO sets of Ten each because there are soooo many that I love for a variety of reasons. In the first set, I am favoring the ones that are masterful captures and renderings of a three dimensional space and/or objects or sets of objects which, with a bit of squinting, or not, can be flat. And in the second set, I will post the relatively flat ones. Thank you All and Happy New Year.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 02:08:08 +0000
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