[Leica] Good pictures and modern art

["Peter Su" <psu@jprc.com>]

I was reading my first copy of Lenswork Quarterly (which, if this copy is
anything to go by, is a must buy and must read for anyone here. See
http://www.lenswork.com ) and there was an interesting discussion of what
makes good content for photography.

Part of the article is a very interesting quote of a writer whose name I
can't remember. A summary of the quote goes something like this:

A long time ago, painters painted portraits, and put the landscape in the
background. Later on, they realized that the landscape was nice to look at,
and started painting just the landscape. People at the time thought this was
really weird, and hated the pictures. But, as time went on, artists taught
us how to see and appreciate landscapes, and now landscape paintings (and
photography!) are highly thought of, and everyone tries to do it themselves.
You'll see dozens of tourists, all at inspiration point, saying "wow, this
is pretty as a picture!"

Modern artists have since branched out into making pictures that aren't
about anything in the natural world. Abstract paintings (and photographs!)
are, of course hard to look at. But, if you spend some time with them, some
are certainly better than others (the example given in the article is
Jackson Pollack... I personally love that stuff). Over time, if the really
good abstract painters teach us to see this stuff the right way, in the
future you'll see people walking up to a concrete wall covered with dirt and
filth and random graffiti saying "Wow! this is just like a picture!"

I think the author has a couple of good points.

1) Its hard to know NOW what will be "art" in the future. A lot of great art
is and was obviously great at the time it was created. A lot of great art
was not appreciated until later.

2) In the cases where art is more appreciated later on, its because the
audience has learned something that it didn't know before.

3) Making abstract art that is good is not all that easy. making abstract
art that is bad is pretty easy.

Anyway, the final point of the article is that photographers should go out
and try to take pictures of something different, and teach everyone how to
see those things in new and more interesting ways.

I recommend that you all take a look at it. The same issue also had a good
piece on the political and ethical issues surrounding digital imaging...

Pete