More on Being a Master Yourself

If you take to heart my premise that the main thing that separates the greats of photography from the rest of us is hard work, determination, absolute commitment at the price of almost all else then what does that mean? For me, it means that it’s time to start making your masterpieces. My masterpieces. And this means what?

Well, first of all it means that I need to decide what my masterpieces are going to be about. I can’t set off to take the pictures unless I have an idea of what I’m looking for. There are a million possible things to photograph and ways to photograph them and you have to decide what kinds of photographs you want to leave the world with.

There are two categories of photographs for me that I will feel good leaving behind me. One is landscape, and the other is what I would call nature details. I think they’re different in tone but each has its own strengths. Landscape can be either grand or more modest in scale but for me it always has the potential to strike deep chords and big themes. I guess everyone wants to leave behind some photographs that are grand or inspiring.

Nature details for me are really not all that different than the larger landscape. They’re considerably more modest in scale, but if done well, I think they can have the same big implications. It’s nice to be impressed with the grandeur of great landscapes but recognizing the spectacular in the smallest of nature’s works is more accessible for most of us and I think is a great lesson for all people.

So those would be the two types of pictures I want to focus on. Someone else might be fascinated by portraiture or urban images or humor or junk yard color and texture. They’re all possibilities that could be fun and interesting but if I think in terms of my legacy, nature and the landscape are it.

Mind you, I don’t literally expect to have any legacy. I don’t expect people to publish books of my work or collect my photographs for museums. I don’t really care about that either. My friends and family and maybe a few others will appreciate what I do and that’s just fine. What I mean is that if I’m to use my life to create images then what kind of images are worth spending my life on? For me, that’s nature, large and small.

So what does that mean I do next? Well, with a picture of the kinds of images I want to take then I need to put myself in the kinds of places where I’ll find those images. For the grander landscapes that means getting out of my house and getting on the road. Not necessarily to famous destinations or anything like that, just to the places that I find inspiring. In fact, unless a particular destination really speaks to you on a deeply personal level, about all you can accomplish by going there is adding another picture to the millions that have been taken by people before you. The picture is unlikely to be highly personal and therefore is unlikely to say anything worth listening to.

Getting out into your personal natural world means going to the places that you know that move and inspire you. That means taking days at a time and going to those places. It probably means sleeping at or near those places for days at a time so that you will see them in all possible weather and light conditions. And you’ll need to go there for days a time over and over again. It’s a real commitment, but if you want to make masterpieces, that’s what’s required. Adams and Weston, et. al. didn’t dabble in photography. They lived it. Maybe you and I don’t want to live it in the same way that they did but if we want to accomplish anything at all we’d better at least get out the door regularly and for extended periods of time in places that really move us.

As for nature details, pretty much the same thing applies. You need to be out at the beach, in the woods or the mountains or wherever your personal nature exists and you need to be looking at it closely, photographing it thoughtfully, looking at the results and going at it again another way until you start learning how to make the images that you imagine.

So I guess that’s my commitment. I’m going to spend more time in the places that I love and I’m going to absorb those places and I’m going to photograph them with the depth of feeling that I have for them. For me, that means getting back to Michigan where I have a life-long relationship with the landscape.

But also, while I’m here in Arkansas, it’s time for me to stop belly-aching about how I don’t like it here and start to look at what’s around me and explore it seriously. I got very frustrated driving around Arkansas looking for a landscape like home. It’s just not there. And I don’t really relate terribly well to the mountains and ranch land that typifies this area. But there are always beautiful details to be seen. There’s a lot of rock and a lot of water in this part of the country, especially as the winter wares on and the water supply builds up. There are lots of beautiful little details that deserve getting to know and that’s where I have to start.

There are intriguing little things that I might want to mess with as well as a bit of recreational photography, but with the idea that I can be a master of photography then maybe I won’t spend much time or effort on those things unless I can see them as part of my “legacy.”

How Much is in the Format?

I’ve been looking at a book of Edward Weston’s photographs and I can’t get over the monumental power of many of his images. But I can’t help thinking that a lot of that power comes down to the incredible detail and richness of texture that is inherent in the 8 x 10″ negatives. An 8 x 10″ negative has more than 50 times as much information as a 35mm negative. That’s a tremendous amount of detail.

As for richness of tone, I’m not sure how the size of the negative affects it but I see a tremendous difference between my 21mp digital images and even the reproductions in this book. I have never used a large format camera and don’t really want to use one but I don’t like the idea that I’m trying to make beautiful photographs with a tool that’s not up to the task. Everyone says how wonderful the tone of large format negatives is but I’ve never seen anyone describe in detail why this should be.

Anyway, I hate the thought that I simply can not get a sufficiently high quality image even with a modern 21 mp camera and top quality lenses. I’ve done a few panoramas with multiple frames from that camera and the fine detail is very noticeable on enlargement. The equivalent of about 75 megapixels makes a pretty nice 10 x 30″ panorama but then you still have the error inherent in the stitching process. I can’t help feeling like the quality still doesn’t approach that of a large format negative. That’s about four times the resolution in a normal image. Remember, the 8 x 10″ negative offers 50 times the detail of 35mm.

I think maybe I’ll try making some stitched images of a smaller subject matter from perhaps four or six frames and see if it makes a big difference in the appearance of the image and at what size you begin to see the difference. Can you see extra resolution in a print as small as 8 x 12 inches? Maybe. I guess I’ll have to find out.

The other thing I simply can’t continue doing if I want sharp and rich images is to hand hold anything! I love to hand hold the camera. I just like looking through the viewfinder and adjusting my view intuitively. I hate the idea of having to wrestle with a tripod in order to get the sharpness I want. But you can’t avoid it. All the pixels in the world won’t help unless you are absolutely locked down on a very solid tripod, you’re using the mirror lockup, and a remote release.

Stitching images may be fine if your subject matter is good enough to hold still for you. I mostly shoot landscape so that’s not too big a problem for me but even in landscape you can run into issues with clouds moving, certainly with water moving, or with a breeze stirring the trees or grasses. I also have my doubts about how good a job stitching software does with highly detailed and complex scenes such as most landscape entails. That, too, requires some experimentation.

I don’t want to get hung up on anything technical. I’m not one of the photographers that loves to think about equipment. I want a camera capable of taking a high resolution, sharp image. I don’t want to own a fleet of different cameras. And I don’t want to have anything to do with film. Unfortunately, even medium format digital is outrageously expensive and it’s not all that much higher in resolution that the top of the line 35mm cameras.

The other part of the look of those Weston photographs is the contrast. I notice a lot of contrast in these images. More than I would normally put in any of my photographs. One of the main keys to the look of a photograph is where you put the contrast via the curves. The photographs in this book look like they have very deep blacks and a lot of subtle distinction in the medium to light values. That suggests to me a curve with a real dip in the dark values and a steeper gradient up toward the high values. Maybe not just a pure high contrast S-Curve but less contrast in the low values with a lot of the change in value spread over the middle to upper values. I’ll have to experiment with that too.

Another aspect of contrast is not just the overall distribution of light and dark in the scene but what I’ll call local contrast. Local contrast adds contrast between elements in small areas rather than just stretching the range from dark to light in the whole image. You will see some of this if you use the “clarity” slider in Lightroom. Plug-ins like Akvis Enhancer do something similar. But once again, I think if there’s not enough detail in the original image then you won’t have enough to work with when you go to increase local contrast either.

So many things to consider in the effort to get great looking prints.

Cult of the Genius

I, like most photographers, I think, tend to look at the photographs of the acknowledged masters of the art and believe that they have something I do not have and most likely never can have. I think it would be a healthy thing to dispense with that idea.

Why should I burden myself with the idea that I can never achieve what they’ve achieved or even approach it? When I step back a bit from this assumption, I think that they were men just like I am. After all, I have a natural feel for visual expression. I have training and experience and maturity. I have a feel for what I want to express and skills sufficient to the task. Why shouldn’t I create photographs the equal of the masters?

I think that for many of us, the biggest reason we don’t accomplish what the masters have accomplished is that we lack the single-minded determination and the unshakeable faith that they had in what they were doing.

If, like Edward Weston, I had two years to travel this country from coast to coast with an 8 x 10 camera and an assistant and the money to pay for film, might I not create powerful and lasting images? Might my skill develop and my vision strengthen with the benefit of doing nothing but photographing for two years?

What if, like Ansel Adams, I lived in Yosemite Valley and hiked the Sierra Mountains daily, might I not take great photographs? I think I could. But the difference is that I dream of the possibility of going to beautiful locations for a few days at a time perhaps. I never consider moving there and making it my life’s work to take photographs. I don’t even travel near my home enough because I allow the pressures of daily life to overcome my desire to be out photographing.

So, I think the biggest difference between the masters and the near masters and the average guy with a knack for visual communication and the knowledge of how to use a camera is that the masters were single-mindedly dedicated to their mission. They did it at virtually any cost.

It’s not that they were magically different than you or I. It’s that they were passionate and dedicated. Maybe we can’t all do that or maybe we don’t even want to, but I think it’s a good idea to drop the idea that you don’t have what they had. You may very well. If you let go of that idea then maybe you will take your own work a little more seriously, allow yourself more time or effort to make your pictures, to realize your vision, push yourself to fully develop your ideas. Even if you’re wrong it’s still a good idea to assume that you have everything that they had.

They really were not gods. They were just men. Determined, single-minded and committed men no doubt, but just men for all that.

There is a line that I like from the book Taking the Leap. I’ll paraphrase a bit. “What are the three things it takes to be successful as an artist? Curiosity, commitment, and good work habits. I bet you thought I was going to say ‘talent’.”

I couldn’t agree more.

With a Little Work

Okay, just for the heck of it I spent a few minutes adjusting a few of the images from the last post. I cropped, adjusted contrast and color and sharpened. In some cases I converted to gray scale and added a split tone. All of this was done in Lightroom by the way.

This is just by way of illustrating that the treatment of the raw material of photographs can create an entirely different look–a look which could define a body of work or a publication.

Here they are:

Some Good Exercise

I mean this in two ways. First, as in exercise for my health and second, as in a photographic exercise.

This morning I went for my usual morning walk, about a half hour up a hill near my house through residential neighborhoods. I was torn before leaving about spending the time when the morning light is good exercising or whether I should be out with the camera instead. After all, you don’t get good photographs with the camera sitting in the house. So, I decided to compromise. I went for my usual walk and I took the camera along with me. I hesitated to take the camera only because it’s pretty cold here and there was also a pretty good chance of some precipitation but I decided to take it anyway.

I decided that rather than make this a “serious” photo expedition, I would just go for the walk and take a few quick snapshots of whatever caught my eye.

What a great idea!

Seems simple enough, I know, but those of us who begin to take ourselves a bit seriously as photographers begin to make photography work and lose some of the pleasure in it. By just taking the camera with little or no expectations of taking meaningful photographs I had a wonderful time, I actually enjoyed using the camera, and I got some ideas that I most likely would not have had if I had left the camera behind. I hear photographers say that they don’t know what to photograph. All you need to do is go out with your camera and no expectations and open your eyes to the possibilities.

Here’s just a partial list of the things I saw on this simple walk that might make good subjects for a body of work.

• Geometric patterns created by lawn furniture with a dusting of snow.
• Nature details of leaves, seed pods, bark, tree branches and a million other things.
• The stripes and other markings on the road.
• Public works items like fire hydrants, telephone poles, signs, manhole covers.
• Conventional landscape and landscape details focusing on the patterns of tree trunks, fences, rocks, etc. set off by the recent light snow.
• Park benches, fences, gates.
• More nature details–fruits, evergreen branches, dried leaves on a tree, vines.
• Statues and other lawn furniture.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. This is just the short list of things that I was interested in. You could easily include the houses and their various features such as windows and doors and roofs. Vehicles of all sorts, and of course the people you meet along the way.

Anyway, you get my point. It was both fun and rewarding for me. I have an idea for a project that arose from this walk. We’ll see if I decide to pursue it but at least the seeds are planted and I feel refreshed.

Once you have the concept then the challenging step begins–fleshing out the idea and finding the way to execute it with power and originality. This is both the hard part and also the satisfying part of photography. How do you take this interesting subject and make it truly powerful and original? How can you look at the subject matter in an original way? How can you set off your subject from it’s background or use the background to enhance the subject? Should this project be done in black and white or color? High contrast or low, high key or low? How would you exhibit the pictures? Would they make a book? Do you want to write a text about the subject or the process of taking the pictures?

Anyway, as you can see, the world can open up in front of you if you stop sitting in your house and thinking about what to photograph and, instead, get out of the house with your camera and just go anywhere nearby. Forget the expedition. It’s nice if you can do that once in a while, but you need subject matter that’s close to you and is readily accessible in all sorts of weather, in all kinds of light.

Here is a small sampling of some of the images I took this morning. None are particularly wonderful but some have the seeds of possibility in them. None have been adjusted for contrast or color or anything so they look flat. But with more time and care and thought and effort, I could make something of at least one of these ideas.

Give this a try for yourself. It will be worth it, even if it’s just to get out and have some fun with your camera instead of working at it all the time.

My Apologies

I have to apologize for the tone of the last couple of posts. I found myself getting preachy and a bit whiny and I don’t like that. There are far too many people shouting at one another in this world and I don’t want to be one of them. My goal here is to be helpful and to share my own struggles, not to be clever.

With that in mind, let me re-visit my post about tips and tricks. It’s true that the idea that a few tips will transform your photography does annoy me. But I want to be helpful, not peevish. What I said in that post is that in order to move toward making your photographs more artistic and personal you simply have to pay attention to what catches your eye and pursue that thing.

It really is as simple as that, but the trick is to be able to notice what’s catching your eye. That seems almost silly to say but we are usually so out of touch with what we are experiencing that we don’t notice these things. With thirty years as a painter behind me, I’ve learned to pay attention but for many of us we simply don’t notice what we’re noticing. Most of us tend to be very intellectually oriented. We walk around thinking a lot but we aren’t in touch with the quiet little voice that says “ooh, look at the texture of that grass over there” or “isn’t it interesting how the light makes a shape on that wall” or any number of small moments of attention. We just miss them.

And when we’re out there trying to find our voice as an artist things can be even worse. We’re thinking about what we’re looking at, we may be running through our catalog of famous photographs looking for images that are like the ones we’ve seen. More and more intellectual stuff and internal dialogue gets in the way of noticing what we find interesting.

You’ve all probably read examples where ten different photographers are taken to the same place and all ten of them looked at and photographed different things. This is actually a very good example to get at what it means to begin to develop your own personal vision. Let’s say the ten photographers are in a city park somewhere. One person might notice the small patterns in the leaves of a particular plant, another might focus on a bed of flowers, another might zoom in on just one flower, yet another will notice the city skyline, and another will focus on the people in the park. You get the idea.

You can also see what you’re attracted to in the kinds of pictures you like by other photographers you know–but this is a little tricky. We all want to have taken certain famous pictures but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the very thing that we need to be focusing on. There will be a seed of your personal truth in any picture that really blows you away but it can be very difficult to decipher which seed is the one.

One of the hardest things to do as a fledgling artist is to absorb and then leave behind the influences of other artists. Any painter worth his salt has wanted to be Monet or Van Gogh or maybe even Mark Rothko. You can be in awe of what those artists have accomplished and attracted to how they accomplished it but the trick is to discern what it is in their work that attracts you and distill it from all of the other things that make up their art. Those are actually three painters whose work I love in their own way. Monet and Van Gogh have a lot in common in their handling of paint. Their use of color is substantially different. Van Gogh’s paintings are much more emotional and visceral. Rothko is a different ball-game altogether. Color is still an important element but it’s handled completely differently. His work is emotional as well though in a very different way.

So how do you digest influences and move on to your own personal vision? I guess the answer is just that it takes time. But you only get there by painting (in my case) or taking photographs and then examining the result and feeling what feels right, what does not and then deciding on the next approach. You try the next approach and maybe it’s a little better, a little more personal, a little less derivative than the first. Or maybe it’s just plain awful and you scurry back to where you were with the last photographs. You just keep on doing this over and over until you slowly home in on what speaks to you personally and says exactly what you want it to say.

The direction you move has to be natural and powerful enough for you that you are compelled to keep working in that direction. If the idea is not really yours then you will tire of trying to imitate someone else’s work no matter how beautiful it may be. The only thing that can possibly drive you to making powerful and original work is your genuine passion for it.

These are the steps that determine whether you develop your own personal voice and the skill to express it. It can take years, to be honest. It probably will take years! Trial and error, attention to what fascinates you, patience and hard work to keep trying things when you feel like you’re getting nowhere and won’t ever amount to anything.

It may be sad to say but it’s really only been in my 50′s that I’ve come to have a clear sense of what is me and what I feel good about. It’s not always clear mind you and I’m having to find a new way as I move from being a painter into being a photographer but I know much more quickly when I’m heading in the right direction. I constantly try to raise my expectations too. Despite what I wrote earlier about not wanting every photograph to have to be exceptional, in one sense they really do need to be exceptional. The world is way too competitive for you to find a place to be seen if your work looks like something anyone else could have done.

I developed the feeling as a painter that the work you see in art galleries  never, ever, looks like something that you could imagine yourself doing. The concept has always been refined, the execution so sophisticated and rich, that no one else could possibly do what that artist does. I have lots of painter friends who do nice work and have developed a style and ideas of their own but who have just not taken the work far enough for it to find a market in a high quality gallery. In painting, it’s usually a matter of not having pushed things far enough. Your color has to be incredibly rich and subtle and complex. Your brushwork and drawing have to be sure and expressive, your composition strong and complex and subtle.

In photography the distinctions are more difficult for me. Anyone can take a camera and create something at least vaguely interesting at least some of the time. There’s no equivalent of personal use of color or brushwork or drawing. Part of it lies in finding exceptional things to photograph but most of it lies in having the vision to see it when it’s in front of you.

The best discussions of this subject that I’ve seen is in George Barr’s book Taking your Photography to the Next Level. You can also find his articles on this subject on the Luminous Landscape web site at  http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/next-level.shtml I highly encourage you to read the three parts of his essay and to buy the book. He also has another excellent book entitled From Camera to Computer which covers the print developing process in wonderful detail.

I don’t do “happy”

One thing that has become very plain to me, almost from the very beginning of my effort to become a photographer, is that I don’t do “happy.” By that, I mean that I don’t like taking “pretty” or excessively optimistic pictures. I think that much of what passes for high end fine art photography is really just very nice calendar photography. I don’t like the classic centered foreground object with the deep perspective of a landscape and usually dramatic lighting and sky. It’s just a formula and no matter how beautiful the scene or the lighting I can’t help feeling the formula and thinking that it means nothing.

The problem I have with “pretty” or overly optimistic pictures is that they just seem trite. The world is filled with post cards and calendars and posters full of beautiful meadows of wildflowers or spectacular sunsets. I want to see photographs that reflect a richer and more complex view of life. Tragedy, doubt, uncertainty and sadness are a part of life as well. Maybe nobody wants to see someone else’s doubts or uncertainties or wants to consider whether there’s tragedy or sadness in life but I don’t really believe that. Of course there’s a place for optimism and joy in life and in pictures but can’t they be represented in a more engaging or original fashion?

Making pictures that seem dark or moody is not enough to ensure that they are any more artistic than conventional happy images. I guess it just comes down to depth in the image. Is it a formula or does it reflect some originality. Can you digest the entire image in a second or two or does it keep you looking for longer. Does it grow on you over time or does it fade to insignificance? Does it add a dimension to your understanding of the world or just waste your time? 

The reasons the boring “happy” photographs are so insipid is that they are really all just a set of push buttons that we understand immediately to be safe and fully digested. There’s no risk of being challenged by such an image. But I don’t think life is like that and I don’t think art’s mission is to repeat what has been said a million times. Of course some people, apparently many people want only a pre-digested simulacrum of happiness. But I would hope that there are many people who want to be challenged and engaged and have their world views expanded.

I used to think that being successful as an artist meant that you would have a big gallery show in a major city and you would be able to present your vision to a knowledgeable and enthusiastic audience. What I think now is that galleries are businesses that make money by selling art. They want to offer a modicum of challenge perhaps but they aren’t in the business of presenting your vision. They want images they think they can sell. I don’t fault them for that. They have to keep the doors open and the utilities paid.

But I can’t help being a bit disappointed. It may be that if you manage somehow to rise to the top of your field and have developed a big and committed following that you might be able to persuade a top flight gallery to show challenging work. Or even work that’s not “extraordinary” but just well observed and satisfying. I don’t know if this can happen or not. I haven’t gotten anywhere near the level where a gallery would take any such chance on me. But I owe it to myself to keep building my vision and taking the photographs and seeking out more places to exhibit and sell my work so that perhaps one day I will have that following that allows me to take chances and say what I want to say rather than make products for consumption by people who only want “pretty” pictures.

Boy, I sound bitter here don’t I. I don’t mean to sound like that. I don’t feel bitter. I just want to be able to take photographs that I am pleased with and find an audience for them. It’s very tempting to keep trying to make photographs that you know your gallery will want and will be able to sell but it’s a slippery slope to becoming an unhappy manufacturer rather than a satisfied artist.

Tips and Tricks

I’ve been looking at a lot of photography magazines and listening to some photography podcasts lately and I can’t get over all the “tips, secrets, and tricks” that they tout. This business annoys the heck out of me. Each such “tip” purports to help your photographs move from ordinary snapshots to highly personal works of art. I want to scream that there are no “tips”, nor are there any “tricks” or “secrets” that will do any such thing!

The thing that will transform your photographs from snapshots into works of art is simply careful attention to the things that interest you and lots of practice, experimentation and thought about how best to capture those things. It’s really as simple as that. I know that’s not really so simple for someone who does not even know where to begin to think about what their own personal artistic voice may be but I do believe that the process really does boil down to paying attention to what captures your interest and exploring over and over how best to present that thing.

What I suspect is that this whole idea seems relatively simple to me because I’ve been an artist (a painter) for most of my adult life. I’ve been through the difficult process of finding my own voice for a very long time. I’ve studied art history so I know how other people have approached this challenge over time. I know what the fundamental issues in art are and have been.

I think there are several reasons this tips and tricks trend is so prominent.

1) It’s just plain easier to talk about f-stops and photoshop tricks than it is to talk about self-discovery.

2) Photography opens up the world of visual arts essentially to anyone who can push a button. The barrier to entry in photography is far lower than it is in painting or drawing. These people have every right to express themselves artistically but they have none of the arts education that serve as the foundation for artists in other fields.

3) Photography attracts a lot of people who are technicians. They love cameras and camera gear, they like messing around on the computer. But then they need to figure out what to take pictures of and why their pictures are so disappointing.

Is there an alternative to the tips and tricks mentality of most magazines and books? Sure, it’s called art history and self-examination. But then that doesn’t sound like a magazine that would sell to the typical novice photographer does it. It might sell to the intermediate to advanced photographer and there are magazines that address that audience, but it won’t sell to the camera junkie on the newsstand. Oh well, I guess I need to take it easy on the readers of these magazines.

Once again I will say that they have every right to express themselves visually. I’m thrilled for them that they are trying to do so. You do need to become technically competent to take good photographs but let’s face it, photography is not rocket science. Frame the shot, focus, control depth of field, and get the proper exposure. That’s about it.

But the prescription for better photographs lies in developing an understanding of what attracts your attention, and following that thing to the ends of the earth with endless experimentation and practice and thought. How’s that for a tip?

Do all photographs have to be extraordinary?

I’ve taken a number of photographs over the last couple of days of things in my back yard here in Fayetteville. They’re not exceptional things, but they’re things that caught my eye and I wanted to examine with the camera. There is a ring of this grass-like plant surrounding the swimming pool here. The leaves of this plant make interesting patterns and textures so I spent maybe half an hour on a couple of days looking at them closely through the viewfinder and taking pictures.

I converted all the photographs to black and white and I like them. I just like them. There’s nothing exceptional about them but they’re photographs that I would enjoy having around the house. I wonder sometimes if every photograph you take has to be exceptional in some way? It seems like there’s so much competition to take extraordinary photographs that there’s no room for simple, beautiful observations of nature. I’m not sure what my gallery will think of these pictures, or if I’ll even have the nerve to show them to them, but I like them and I want to feel free to take pictures like these and show them to people.

Here are a few of the photographs from that session:

I think they’re nice, if not exceptional, but I don’t want to dismiss them. I’m thinking of converting some of my other images to black and white and putting together a portfolio of them. I might include some of the flowers I’ve shot and perhaps other nature details.

I think part of the reason for this set of photographs is that I’ve been looking at a book on Edward Weston. All of the gorgeous black and white photographs etched in such incredible detail have begun to make me see in those terms. I also recently saw a book of Ansel Adams photographs that were in color. These immediately pointed out to me what a different thing color photography is from black and white. It’s very hard to overcome the reality of a color photograph and bring the focus to the formal qualities of a photograph. Black and white seems to abstract things and call attention to the kinds of things that capture my attention. I am loathe to give up the color but sometimes it’s just the best thing to do.

These books also point out to me that some of the photographs they took and which are documented in these books are really not exceptional. If I had taken these pictures as a part of a day’s work, I would probably not mark any of them as suitable for printing. This is not to disparage their work, it’s just to point out that I think the standard and expectation for photographs has gotten somehow out of whack. Today, unless a photograph is extraordinary in some way–something that no one has ever seen or thought of before–then it’s not deemed acceptable for exhibition or purchase. I think that leaves out a lot of potential pictures that are nice observations of ordinary things and deserve to be seen.

But not Just an Aesthete

What I realize is wrong with my last post is that I’m not just an aesthete. I’m an artist. An Artist can’t just experience or appreciate beauty, they have to try to participate in it, to create it. And that may be where the unsavory second definition of aesthete arises from. To profess a great love for beauty and to do nothing about it is perhaps always a mark of someone who is not genuine about that love; someone whose love for beauty is an affectation. That would just be impossible for me or any of the other millions of artists out there.