Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Yesterday I made a valentine for my wife, using the picture http://www.leica-gallery.net/markdavison/image-24669.html and a short poem: Rooms There are rooms where the light falls and lingers like the memory of a caress. There are rooms where passion flares, is savoured, and not forgotten. There are rooms where love enters, and never leaves, haunting the smallest crevice with sweetness. Let us live out our lives in these rooms. It is not an award-winning photograph, suffused as it is with flare, even with Solms best 35mm lens. My eighth grade English teacher would probably blanch at the poem. But the two together convey a sentiment much more strongly than any Hallmark card I could buy. So for me the question is not, how do I become and award winning artist or photo-journalist? The question is, how can I use art and technique to make my own personal communications powerful, honest, true, sometimes near beautiful? In short, can I use the camera to make my own art, and not be forever at the mercy of general purpose images shot by someone else. Sometimes a message is no less important because it has an audience of one. I think we should stop belittling people who just want to take better pictures of their family joys and sorrows, for their family. What higher purpose could a camera, and a democratic art form, really serve? Happy valentine's day a day late. Mark Davison - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html