Blakely's conflict-driven vs. Flory's harmonic paradigms represent the ends of the spectrum. Most people experience a combination of the two.
I think people adopt paradigms that best reflect their life energies. For Blakely that's obviously conflict, for Rand, harmony.
What did Rand mean by hamony ? Some sort of hug-a-tree, Khumbaya (sp?) playing-in-the-background, idyllic state ? Or as I imagine, something far more sophisticated (just as Blakely's conflict theory is not, I assume, a mere clashing of cymbals).
When one photographs for oneself, it's not just the light echoing from the thing before the lens (pinhole/photogram/etc) that gets into the film or CCD/CMOS, but inner light echoing off the photographer's being, both his personality and what he felt/thought at the moment the image was made. Show a few dozen images taken over time, and you are showing yourself (to an astute eye) in all your shiny, seductive, captivating glory (or...).
Here lie the marvels and the terrors, and a secret: The only option one has to really change their art is to change oneself. Grow, shrink, or better yet, die -and resurrect- and so will your photographs -- and the way you see other's images.
The idea that pictures have no meaning, that meaning is issued by the viewer, is valid, but not universal. Allegories, specifically those dating from the Middle Ages were more like pictograms. It is hard to understand today that at that time, the visual vocabulary & syntax was shared and widely spread. Most people may have been illiterate, but when they entered a church, they could read the windows just like one would read the Bible today, but with far less latitude of interpretation. Or a stop sign's octagonal/red shape.
Now we are more in the position of the busy builders of the tower of Babel. This is neither to the good or bad, just a shift in consciousness. The maker of an image (or text) can encode meaning, though there's no guarantee (and little chance) that the viewer will get it, in a direct correspondence.
Just as the photographer can only photograph from who he is, the viewer can only interpret from his own perspective, and that's a good thing, for it would otherwise reduce artwork to the status of puzzles if there was but one "solution" or meaning, and the artist to cleverness.
--- Luis
