[Leica] Re: Postings, abstraction, etc.

[rpalmier at depaul.edu (Robert Palmieri)]

Folks - 

Sincere thanks to all who reponded to my weekend photo postings.  Yeah,
the abstraction thing has the potential to be tedious, toney,
pretentious, and dumb; which keeps me on my toes when working in that
dangerous area. I'm really concerned with doing my best to keep a clear
distinction between "art" and "arty".  I never did any of this abstract
stuff 'till a couple of years ago when a few things happened in quick
succession:

            1. I spent a lot of time looking at terriffic collections of
mid-twentieth century                              abstract
expressionist paintings and lithographs.

            2. The owner of one of these collections challenged me to
pursue that vocabulary with snaps.

            3. I bought a Leicaflex SL.

Before all this stuff I shot almost exclusively in black & white with
M's for 30 years (with some Canons in there for awhile after the theft
of my M-4).  Normal to wide lenses, fast film, loose framing.  Then
somehow the view through the SL (plus the above-mentioned factors) led
to this whole other slow film, tight views, careful composition in color
thing.

So ironically, I have hundreds of B&W images that I like (mostly
unscanned) but there's more color up on the Pbase website partly because
it's more recent (coinciding with scanner ownership) and partly because
I thought the color thing displayed better on monitors.

I also think that perhaps my 2700 dpi scanner doesn't work that well
with the high speed B&W thing.

Bob Palmieri