Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I've always felt that photographs should evoke emotions. Good, bad, ugly, pretty, pick your adjective. Just keep shooting. Obviously Mike, flowers evoke emotions that are strong, therefore the photos are doing their job. Rob Mueller Studies in Black and White www.studiesinblackandwhite.com rob@studiesinblackandwhite.com - -----Original Message----- From: Mike Johnston [mailto:michaeljohnston@ameritech.net] Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 4:30 AM To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: [Leica] Pleasing flower pictures?!? >>>But true, this discourse does serve to clarify our thinking. My thinking is that there is no limit on the number of pleasing flower, cat, or small children pictures, not that millions of these ought be displayed in museums or art galleries<<< You are not a real aesthete until you know what you love and what you hate, irrespective of the prevailing mass taste or critical consensus. This may entail coming to grips with liking things that some savants detest and also perhaps hating things that are widely admired. IMHO the three major failings of photographers in this area are: 1. They conflate technical beauty with aesthetic interest or effect. 2. They suffer from a sort of vague acceptance of the amorphous general idea that some subjects "make good pictures," if only because "other people" seem to like and accept some subject matter or treatment...and then they rather over-anxiously pander to this perception. For this reason I see many amateur photographers obsequiously attempting to mimic STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY, making clean, pretty, and utterly superficial photographs that conform to a sort of bland professional standard of goodness. Bah, bah, and more bah humbug to this. As an academic exercise, I used to make my students take a stock photography catalog and try to find three good pictures in it. It's completely surprising to them how difficult a task this is! 3. They get stuck: that is, they don't take into account the fact that aesthetic taste CHANGES as one's experience of art moves along. It's okay to not eternally love something you used to love; and it's imperative to struggle to accept and understand new things. What you hate with the most vigor is often the most important work to you at any given point in your development, because it tends to show what you are just beginning to come to grips with. A Christian evangelist I once met told me that he welcomes hecklers, because "it is from the ranks of hecklers that all the converts come. The people I can't reach are the people who don't care enough to heckle." Yet many photographers are alarmed by hating something (or perhaps by the idea that they might learn to like it!), and simply reject what they avidly hate. This is the worst mistake in art. It means you are stuck at where you once were, and have stopped growing. Even having bad taste is better than having someone else's taste and not even knowing it. <s> - --Mike