Well since I made the orginal comment I'm sitting here feeling a little
bit rebuked! But only a little: it was a personal comment, i.e. my own
feelings not a snipe at Marilyn's work or at anyone else's. Perhaps I'm
a little bit jaundiced by spending a lot of my time steering "raw"
students away from the idea that every digital photograph needs to be
photoshopped to be valued and the whackier the result the better it
becomes. As I said in my original post I can neither paint nor draw and
am envious of those who can. So I'd love to see see Marilyn's paintings.
The difference - for me - though comes between the purely manual skills
the painter has and those that are derived no matter how cleverly, from
those of the skilled programmers at Adobe or elsewhere. Nevertheless, I
admire the work of Bert Monroy; though I do find his work somewhat
sterile I could never achieve anything even remotely as skilled.
Likewise the creations of people succeeding in the Photoshop User Awards
(see http://www.photoshopuserawards.com/winners.php).
But maybe I just feel that Photography is in danger of forgetting and
losing its roots which were based in some effort to capture a real
moment, in favour of generative and non-real image making. That
Photography is about "as it is" and not fantasy.
Perhaps I'm a Luddite in the new world of digital imagery!!
But at least my comment stimulated quite a few responses...
Howard
