Good points, Chris (& oh jeez, my typos!: aargh).
I think there are art photos, & that there it how the photo is framed, how situated, that count, first, & then, yes, B&W, so light & shadow do the job, & colour would actually get in the way of that intentional seeing.
A lot of pomo photo-art seems to me to be rather too 'cute,' arch, & using colour in a kind of faux-fauvist manner. It can work, but Ive seen some work in galleries that simply turned me off. The great B&W photographers do achieve art, I think. Minor? Maybe...
So, what I was getting at was not that a photographer cannot show something of what she has 'seen' &, especially, shaped by eye, ie, framed as necessary sight, but that, often, for me, with colour photography (digital), the exact grade of light across the sky, for example, does not come through as seen & remembered, a slightly different critique...
Doug
On 2012-05-24, at 6:52 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
> On 25/05/12 00:59, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>> I think we actually see*with intent* in a way no machine can (yet anyway). So there's some overtone of the seen that shifts& changes minutely as we look that a shot doesnt get. Do the photo is often really beautiful but still isnt quite what i 'saw'...?
>
> The above to me, rather well, describes photography failing as an art and simply being a static documentation. Most, if not all the photos I found simply illustrated. Sure, I could read the light, so to speak, but this did not convince me they were good art photos, in my expectations.
>
> An art photo, however, does shift and change. It needs to do this, so as to give a photo that something extra that makes it poetry and art. The dynamics and movement is not perceived or is an imperceptible becoming. An art photo constantly changes, despite the camera and film, or electronics being used. This becoming is also preserved; more essential poetics. But here I am putting demands on photography that I wouldn't expect most others to follow. For me, using a large format monorail camera with B&W film, or a cheap point and shoot digital and image manipulation on a cheap netbook and gimp should both be able to do this. So the machine or mechanism itself cannot make it or is independent of the medium, making an art photo a miracle. Hence the difficulty of using a camera to make art, which is still considered a minor art... but then writing poetry is just as demanding.
>
> anyway, just an extra comment on what is becoming more and more the link between poetry and art photography, again for me. (Always this dread off imposing my poetics...)
>
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Latest books:
Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
Why can’t words mean what they say?
Robert Kroetsch
