Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/13
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Tom Finnegan wrote, in part: > From what I remember, Jay and Hurn tend to label literal work as > 'photography', and non-literal or interpretive work is considered 'visual art > that uses the photographic medium' This, of course, is nonsense. It all requires interpretation. It is all a subset, a selection, of one or more aspects of the real world. Ceci n'est pas un pipe, as Margritte put it. Just because Jay and Hurn choose not to be aware of their interpretation for some subset of photographic work, doesn't mean that everyone else must do the same. A photograph can be viewed in many different ways -- I can choose to see Cindy Sherman's work "Movie Stills" as just straight depictions of a woman in various poses, and I can choose to interpret BD's "A Day in Our Lives" as a reflection on social and family values in the early 21st century. Neither is more or less valid than the other. To arbitrairily select the dimension of "literalness" as a catagorisation basis and claim that it -- somehow -- carries greater epistemological validity than any other arbitrairily chosen dimension is just academic codswallop. M. - -- Martin Howard | Trying to determine human performance by Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU | experiments is nothing but the ritual of email: howard.390@osu.edu | The Ballet for the Gods of Invariance. www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ +-------------------------------------------