Art & Perception

I had a very successful Photo Lucida with my contra dance project. The consensus after 4 days of reviews, with some of the top people in the photography fine-art field, is that the project has legs and great potential. Now I need to name it.

Alec Soth has a post today on book titles. He loves pondering them, feels they define and sum up the nature of a work, and that they can make or break the success of a book.

I am considerably less gifted in this realm, despite my usual felicity with words. I am struggling to come up with an all-encompassing, pithy and memorable title for my contra dance project.

“Contra Dance in America: A Photographic Journey” is accurate, but really boring. My other working title, “Unconfined Joy,” is from the over-quoted Lord Byron poem, which goes,

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
   ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Any ideas out there? Here’s the link to my “yes-it-really-needs-updating” dance page. You can also look through the blog posts from Photo Lucida.

Ansel Adams was known for his skill in capturing monumental landscapes in massive detail. But he was well aware that sharpness for its own sake is sterile: “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” What would he think of this fuzzy image of a fuzzy concept?

Though this photograph appears blurred, the camera was actually quite well focused on the subject. Which was my shadow cast by the rising sun on the off-white wall of the hallway outside my office. Not period.

Despite the blur, this image may beat any of my others in conceptual edge, at least according to some who shall remain nameless. At the same time, it seems to fit my recent protestation of edgelessness (see comment 52 of last week’s post). I swear that the image, the poem(??), and the Adams quote were entirely unacquainted with each other in my conscious mind before I started writing this post. Nor, until this very moment, had any of them met William Henry Fox Talbot’s (love the names!) description of his 1839 photographic invention as “the art of fixing a shadow.” Photography and writing are sometimes parallel paths of discovery.

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Painting From Life vs. From Photos

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Who are the great, the truly great artists of our times? — let’s say, artists active in the period 1975 to 2000.

I realize that some might say that it is too early to judge. If this is your opinion, I’d like to ask a parallel question: who are the artists active prior to 1975-2000 who came to be recognized as great during that period?

Also, let’s not confuse ‘great’ with ‘important.’ Andy Warhol, was undoubtedly an important artist, but a great one? I don’t know — maybe you do!

 

From today’s New York Times “Digital manipulation is just another tool. It’s less profound than the lens you use, or the angle. But in the end, photography is all about manipulation, and as it’s evolved, it’s become more manipulative in every way. I’ve never seen photography as a truthful medium. It’s about individual perceptions of reality, and that’s what people want to see.”

The Times examines the work of London photographer, Nick Knight.  “When I’m producing a piece of work,” Knight says, “I’m looking for something I haven’t seen before, and once I’ve produced it, I’ll want to see something else.”

One of the world’s most successful fashion photographers, Knight lives in the digital world.

I realized that one of the most fascinating and potentially controversial and engaging aspects of digitally enhanced photography is that unlike any other visual art form before it, just about anyone with a computer can have at it.  A great artist’s work (assuming you accept Knight as a great artist) becomes an interactive experience that can evolve, devolve and easily change according to the viewer’s own vision.  Imagine a visual art form that is a photograph or creation that is the combined effort and vision of both the artist and the viewer(s).  Warhol’s multiple images reimagined except the series is the work of the original artist digitally “enhanced” infinitely by his viewers. more… »

The exigencies of life have ever had a way of intruding on art.

Today, for example, I had a really fun post in the works. I got a bunch of pictures from my various ski adventures this season, and I was planning a little art of life exposition.

Grammarians will recognize my use of the pluperfect, for all that is long in the past.

Instead of spending a few hours cooking fine cuisine for wealthy and highly appreciative guests — the usual case at the resort where I chef — I find myself having to serve up a cost effective buffet for a gang of miscreants who’ve grossly underpaid; furthermore, we just lost half our staff.

Grrr…

And so I take this brief moment to apologize once again for a non-post. Many people think artists are not able to deal with real life. To the contrary, I think we are generally as tough as they come. We have to be. The universe does not often agree with our dreams.

This came in today’s email:

It seems I’ve been seeing more and more theme cookbooks these days. I almost never look at them. And I’m not proposing that we create a compilation of “Favorite recipes from Art and Perception.” I am interested not so much in what you cook as in how you cook.

My question: Is there any connection between how you cook and how you do art?

I don’t mean to suppose that my plates have heaping mountains of textures while David’s meals are more flattened shapes like Chinese roadkill, or that Rex dines on charred tidbits while Sunil’s dishes are drenched in ketchup and mustard.

It’s more about approach, about your fundamental relation to your creations. Do your art and your cooking reveal two entirely different yous? Or is your life a seamless whole that reflects your intuitive grasp of the universe?

Are you always trying new dishes? Are they invented by you or from a cookbook? Do you follow recipes precisely? At all? Do you like to use exotic ingredients? Do specialized kitchen tools turn you on? How do you recharge your culinary batteries when you hit a slump?

I’ll provide some of my own answers, but first I have to go and make breakfast.

By the way, got any good recipes?