+ Comments
observation #1 - 2010-01-24 12:52:22
| two weeks ago i started taking a fine art photography class. in the first class the instructor said we would approach photography as a critical art practice - he defined 'critical art practice' as To Understand - to be fully cognizant of what it is you're doing when you take a photograph. i'm pretty excited about this approach as i've been trying for a while to be more cognizant of what i'm doing with the camera and why. one of our assignments is to keep a 'media scrapbook' with both images we take and ones we collect from newspapers or gallery openings - things that attract our attention. it's like a photographic sketchbook. i've started the scrapbook and it's instructive to see what merits the time and attention it takes to print something or cut it out and put it in the book. in the interest of concentrating my efforts and thinking i'm going to hijack my photoblog for the next 3 months and make it a place where i also record and think about what i'm drawn to - what ideas i'm thinking about - what might be jumping off points for future projects. i hope it doesn't get boring for regular visitors here. the bonus part though is i'll talk about our assignments and ideas and people we're exposed to in class. like Bill Viola. he's a film maker more than a photographer but his work is striking and beautiful - we watched parts of a video on his process and he spoke about keeping notebooks of ideas. at one point he had an image of a burning man and he wrote that idea down and forgot about it. a few months later he was writing and the idea of a burning man came up again. this happened a few times until finally he made some burning man film and then out of this came the idea for water and he made more works with water pouring over figures. some of these can be seen on his website and as i say they're really striking. i don't know what these shirt photographs i've posted are about for me. both photographs were taken in the last two weeks - both taken through windows. the one on the right was taken first - just some shirts seen in a thrift store window in my neighborhood and they attracted my attention. the photograph on the left is a table of shirts seen in the American Eagle store in the local mall. i wish i understood more about the pull for me to photograph clothing - and i wish i had more ideas for a project around photographing clothing. perhaps in time. i'll leave you with a quote from Bill Viola from an interview published in the November 2004 Shambala Sun. When Bill Viola was in Japan and trying to find someone to teach him ink painting he realized "... perhaps art resided in life itself, that as a practice it derives primarily from the quality of experience, depth of thought and devotion of the maker." |
N/A 0 sec N/A Flash: Fired |