If you tell me your favorite color is red, I'll nod and say, well, mine is blue. An argument as to which of the two is superior isn't necessary, or legitimate.
But then, we like to argue. The person with great verbal or debating skills might well make an impassioned and compelling case for blue over red, but it's merely rhetoric. Smoke & mirrors, in other words.
An aesthetic absolute, with which we may evaluate works of art and put them into a heirarchy of value, does not exist. Art criticism therefore is nothing more than an expression of a personal preference-- which we may cheerfully take or leave.
Regards,
John
John Palcewski
Isola d' Ischia, Italia
Vittoria's Island, an imagenovel:
www.palcewski.com/VI
Photographically illustrated fiction:
www.palcewski.com/stories
John, after viewing Kostas's gallery photo, concludes that in his: >horridly biased opinion images of rock star guitar >players are the most overworked visual cliches of our >culture. Having seen over the years every conceivable >approach--from tack sharpness to indisginguishable >blur, from under- to overexposed, etc.--one looks for >something original. These guitar player images >obviously appeal only to the extremely young, to whom >everything appears original. I don't know if I'm arguing with you, John. But your remarks got me thinking. A cliche, yes. Horribly overworked? I'm not sure. In any case, it's hard to avoid photographic cliches, of musicians, of crowded street scenes in B&W, of lonely street scenes in desaturated color, of lighthouses along the shore, of rock formations in Arches, of more rocks in Yosemite, of pretty young women not wearing clothes, of cute kids, of sunsets over ancient castles, of starving children with swollen bellies, of neon signs in the rain, snazzy new architecture, dilapidated old architecture, of bare trees in the bleak midwinter.... I wouldn't want to ask anyone to avoid these cliches. Or even to find a way to make the image original, at least not first and foremost. (Seems to me that originality is overrated.) First and foremost, I'd ask them to make the image compelling. Meaning that I would want the image to touch me somehow--in my head or in my heart or both, doesn't really matter. And this, it seems to me, is a matter of craft and of soul. Compelling? Could be the story the photo tells, the implied narrative. Or the story that it doesn't tell, the mystery. Could be information, as in, Golly, that's what the interior of the Cotton Club looked like in 1936. Could be light, shadow, form, texture, color or its absence. Could be simply, Oh, that's what my favorite guitar player looked like when he was gigging at the Blind Lemon. The image should be well crafted, and it's gotta have soul, but it need not be particularly original, any more than a blues guitarist solo needs to be particularly original to move me. Soul trumps originality. (Duke Ellington put it better: It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.) This may be related. Last Saturday evening, I spend a couple hours in a bookstore, looking through Winogrand 1964, a recent compilation of photos that he made during a cross-country roadtrip in 1964. Many of the photos are astonishingly beautiful. And his vision was surely original. But that's not what moved me. What moved me was the way that what America looked like to him interacted with the way his photographs looked like to me, at the moment, and with my own childhood memories of what America looked like to me, in 1964, when I was a kid. It was a wonderful experience, based in part, I admit, on communing with Winogrand's profound artistic vision. But I've had similar experiences looking at less artistically ambitious documentary photography. Last thought. The audience for Kostas's photo is not simply people who like photography. It's likely to be fans who enjoy photographs of the musicians and musical genres that they like. For instance, I can't get enough of photographs of jazz, classical, blues, and bluegrass musicians in rehearsal and performance. Some's better than others--Decarava, Leonard, Gottlieb, to mention our honored elders--but if it's well-crafted and moves me in some way, I like it. Originality be damned. Sorry to go on for so long. In the interests of full disclosure, I should remind PFers that I take lots of cliched photos of jazz, classical, blues, and bluegrass musicians at house parties, in clubs, on stage, and in rehearsal. --John, in Charlottesville __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
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