I have to confess to being slightly in awe of the lack of irony required to give images really pretentious titles like the one above.
A couple of years ago, I saw a magazine article featuring photos of horses entitled "Equus" which really crystallised this sense that the photographer was trying to say something along the lines of "Right, that's horses summed up. What's next?", which is obvious tosh.
John Berger, writing in "Ways of Seeing", makes the point that we shouldn't mystify art because in doing so we obscure the historical reality of the circumstances of its creation and dissemination. He was writing about oil painting, but the point is in many ways more relevant to photography, in relation to which writers routinely invoke the sublime to justify designating as art that which is, after all, the output of a mechanical process.
Wilhelm Flusser tries to get round this issue by arguing that photographic apparatus has the possibility of certain images encoded into it and that art is produced when the photographer exceeds or evades these to produce something original. I must admit that I haven't come to a conclusion about this line of thought, but it seems intuitively wrong to me. I guess that it depends on your views regarding the sanctioned role(s) of images and image makers in our society.
That's not to say that photography can't produce art. However most if it, if we're honest, is craft, and there's nothing wrong with craft-work (or Kraftwerk, for that matter).
Anyway, here's an image of couple of tulips. Enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment