Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/04/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Eric wrote that he finds many art photographers to be among "the most pretentious people" he's ever met, and that "their work often just plain stinks." And several people commented, like GH, that "often I get the impression that I...am being conned" by art photographers. One could hardly argue that conning does not fall easily within the scope of human behavioral possibilities, but there may be other (and perhaps more likely) possibilities here too. As Eric himself pointed out, "there are pictures on my web site that mean a lot more to me than they do to others." And sometimes this can happen because, as Ted observed, we may be "our own worst editors, even though we think we know our work better than anyone else on earth." Even if we only THINK we know our work better than anyone else, we certainly DO know our feelings and intentions better than anyone, and therein can lie a problem. Our own immersion in our feelings and intentions can lead us to project them onto whatever works of art we create, causing us to see more---sometimes far, far more---in those works than is actually there. Our works may appear to have, as Michael C. Johnston wrote, "whole worlds of meaning to...[us, their creators], but to others they're just photographs." Thus a "pretentious" artist may not be so much conning his audience as he is simply suffering from insufficient objectivity about his own work. (And this can be true, of course, in contemporary painting, sculpture, writing, music, or any of the arts.) Art Peterson