Falling

I had a dream.
I was standing on the edge of a cliff.
I looked down and  could see nothing but fog.
I stood there wondering how far down the cliff-face ran.
Then quite suddenly,
pushed by a gust of wind,
I fell.
Off the edge.
Plunging head first into the fog.
I could feel the fear and desperation as I dropped and picked up speed.
I reached out with my hands trying to grasp at something,
anything that would help me stop or slow my fall.
The feeling of fear overwhelmed me but I remember wishing,
in the dream,
“please let this be a dream”.
But the falling continued and terror gripped my heart.
It felt so real I could barely breathe and just as panic consumed me,
something…
just…
let go.
I am not sure how to explain it but in the dream,
as I was falling,
the mind,
it simply…
let go.
There was nothing to grasp,
there was no way to stop my fall.
Other than by hitting the ground which was surely coming up to meet me.
So the mind just let go.
Without so much as a mournful regret.
Or even a thought of death.
Perhaps it was out of self-preservation but thought simply stopped.
There was nothing else to do.
At that moment, the fog cleared and suddenly I realised that I wasn’t falling.
I was flying, soaring out of a cloud and what had once been a cliff-face was now the ground below me.
There was a sense of relief, a desire to laugh and something else.
Something sweet.
Like a melody.
Something from deep within.
Recognition.
Remembrance.
Like a long lost memory,
from the beginning of time,
resurfacing with such clarity that I could only wonder as to how I had forgotten it in the first place.
The ground that was coming to crush me had been nothing more than an idea.
A story.
As told by a master story-teller,
the mind.
I had not been falling, so much as I had fallen for a story.

The bird, the chair, toc went the clock

I first heard of the film “Midnight in Paris” a couple of years ago (Note: if you haven’t seen this movie this post might be a bit of a spoiler. Feel free to skip to the fourth paragraph). At the time I was fascinated by the idea of a Woody Allen and Owen Wilson collaboration. I am a fan of Allen as a director and script writer and Wilson is perfectly likeable even if a little predictable as an actor. What fascinated me about this film was the combination of these two Hollywood pros. I couldn’t imagine it. The two seemed an odd couple and incompatible in their outlook on life; at least in as much as what I knew about them. In any case, after first reading about this film I didn’t seek out any previews or synopsis (as I normally do) so that when I finally got to see it a few months ago, its plot came as a total surprise. I could say that I was blown away as I watched Wilson’s character travel back to the 1920’s in Paris. I felt like I was seeing my own fantasy acted out in front of me. My favourite city in my favourite era with my favourite artists. All of it put together so beautifully by Allen’s masterful direction and Wilson’s infectious charm and charisma.

It’s a fanciful story with a moral which Owen Wilson’s character realises towards the end of the movie; wishing to be somewhere else in some other time, is missing the point where happiness is concerned and in the end will get you nowhere. I already knew that but I still like to entertain the fantasy of going back in time to sit in Parisian cafes and discuss art and philosophy with Dali, Magritte, Ernst, Buñuel, Sadoul and Man Ray. It’s a fun thing to do if nothing else.

I hold a certain fascination for Surrealism and those who created art of this genre. An argument can be made that all art is created on some sub-conscious level but the Surrealists were the first to take that notion seriously and in the process tried to manifest the sub-conscious in their art. What they tried to do was to go beyond mind and into the reality that the mind tends to filter out. Whether this is what they achieved is open to argument with Freud being one of the early critics of the movement despite the fact that Freud’s work with the unconscious, dream interpretation and free association was regarded as instrumental by the Surrealists in developing ways of freeing the imagination to manifest the sub-conscious. I am under no illusion that “Midnight In Paris” romanticised this epoch in art history just as I tend to do—any artistic genre that has its own manifesto with a publication called “La Révolution surréaliste” is sure to have an agenda that goes beyond pure artistic endeavours.

I don’t understand much about the sub-conscious and all the associated mental concepts that go with it but I do understand about art and creativity coming from somewhere beyond what is generally accepted as conscious thought. In my own experience I would go as far as to say that conscious thought, deliberate thinking, is more likely to hamper the creative process then aid it. Saying this, I do not wish to suggest that I know anything about the surrealist idea of psychic automatism to express the functioning of the mind but there are times, few and far between, when I make an image that seems to solidify what had up to that point, merely been some mental concept floating in my head that I could not pin down.

So this brings me to this particular photo (“The bird, the chair, toc went the clock”) that I made some time back. I was walking around a part of town I hadn’t visited in a long time and I was walking without purpose (a rare thing for me these days). There were a number of furniture stores in the area and I have a fascination with well designed, aesthetically pleasing furniture but that’s another story. I’d been in and out of a few stores when I decided it was time for me to get going when I came across this store window which caught my eye mostly due to a giant mask sitting behind the window pane. After what I had seen that day this particular window display had little going for it beyond this oversized mask staring lifelessly into the void. I felt the need to take a photo of this display but for some reason resisted it. I turned my back on it to cross the street and as I waited to cross I once again felt the urge to take a photo. I turned back, brought up my camera and saw that I was too close and could not fit it all in. My lens was simply not wide enough. Oh well, too bad, I’d tried. I turned once again and with no traffic on the road I started to cross. Half way across the first lane I spun around and took a shot of the store and then stood there in the middle of the road wondering what had just happened. It was the sound of oncoming traffic that woke me out of my reverie and had me dash across to the safety of the opposite footpath. I didn’t think about it again until a few days later when I was looking at the images on my computer (the original photograph is at the end of this post).

There was a giant mask similar to the smaller ones found in Venice but without the feathers or frills. Looking at the image more closely however, I realised it wasn’t the mask which grabbed my attention. It was a combination of many things which somehow mashed into a strangely holistic picture. There was the mask of course but also a chair and other bits and pieces, and then there was a row of old buildings which were merely reflected in the glass but seemed to be integral to the image that I saw. As my eyes wondered around the image memories sprang up out of the past and into the present moment all of them linked to me and my story of course since they were my memories. It seemed as if I could relate every aspect of this image to something in my life. Past and present. This isn’t necessarily weird or unusual but it was an interesting feeling. Just as I was digesting this I saw my reflection in the glass. There I was, taking the picture, a faint reflection lost in the bigger picture but somehow significant. Or not. I wasn’t sure. Then with my cursor hovering over the delete button (it wasn’t much of a photo as far as photos go) something happened… I saw me. I don’t mean the reflection of me but me as if the image was a self-portrait. Perhaps the best I had ever taken (which, I grant you, isn’t saying much).

Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud) once said that “everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it is a chair.” This is a sentiment I’ve held for a long time (and touched upon in previous posts) but only really felt in my core as I worked on this photograph. As photographers, endlessly recording the outward appearance of things around us, we are inadvertently revealing something about ourselves every time we click the shutter, every time we dodge, burn, manipulate, texturize, perhaps even when we apply an instagram filter. Or not. I can’t speak for everyone but I have often thought that this was the case with my own photography. As I worked on this photograph, dodging, burning, manipulating, adding some elements to further tie the memories together, I realised the full truth of it. This photo is a portrait. It says something about me even if it is not fully apparent to anyone else.

I follow a number of photographers, some of whom are listed on this blog, and even though I have never met any of them beyond the virtual confines of the Internet I feel like I know them. I have built up this knowledge in part from their words on their blogs but primarily from their photographic work. Like I said, I have long felt like Lucian Freud, that creative work is autobiographical in nature. So in theory I could meet up with any of these people, in real life, and immediately feel like I’ve known them for a long time.

In theory.

One day, if life allows, I plan to buy a round-the-world ticket and put my theory to the test.

To understand, to know, to express

Other than the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic,

I see three other subjects as essential to a child’s education.

Even if it is only in their most basic form.

Philosophy, physics and art.

To understand Life.

To know Life.

To express,

Life.

Fantasy walk

Once upon a time I posted a question to a group and asked who they would like to have on a fantasy photo-walk. You may have heard of fantasy dinner parties where you can invite any one from the past or the present. Well instead of a dinner party I thought that in light of the audience I was addressing (all of us amateur photographers), a fantasy photo-walk would make more sense. That turned out to be a mistake. The question generated a lot of heated discussion but most of it focused on the idea of photo-walks. Apparently people felt quite strongly about doing group photo-walks. I will admit that I am not a big fan of them. At most I would go with one or two friends but certainly not a large group as you sometimes see organised by Flickr groups and Google Plus. But then again… that wasn’t the point! The point was the “who to invite” part and what I was hoping for was for discussion around “why those particular people”.

At some point, after the debate on photo-walks abated, I mentioned my list. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake too because people got stuck on one particular choice and the rest of the discussion was all about the pros-and-cons of this particular photographer’s technique. That discussion was worthwhile but it didn’t go anywhere else. None of the other photographers was discussed and in the end I never got to hear about anyone else’s choices. However there was one comment that was made—which seemed to be echoed by a few people in the group—that there was no benefit in looking at or studying the work of other photographers. That statement had me at a loss for words so I didn’t say anymore.

Anyway, the photographers on my list were not necessarily my favourite nor is it definitive. There are a couple on the list whose work I don’t particularly like or whose technique is simply not for me. However, not liking a photographer’s work or style is not enough to preclude me from learning something from them. And I don’t mean just about photography. All of us got to where we are and who we are due to different sets of circumstances. We each have our unique story to tell and I happen to be a huge fan of stories. And even though I am not a fan of photo-walks, I imagine I would get a lot out of walking around with any or all of these people, camera in hand, trying to get a glimpse of the world they see.

So for what it’s worth, here are the who’s and why’s (in brief) of my fantasy photo-walk:

Minor White for seeing beyond the viewfinder,
Henri Cartier-Bresson for his passion,
Bruce Gilden for getting real close,
Matt Stuart for his fascination with people,
Helen Levitt for being a celebrated nobody,
Robert Doisneau for marvelling at the most ordinary things,
Gordon Parks for his hungry heart,
Alexey Titarenko for sucking me into his world,
Simon Høgsberg for reminding me we’re all gonna die.

Art’s reason

I have never learned to play music. This is unfortunate but such is life. The opportunity to learn simply never presented itself. So having never learnt what are the odds that I might play a song on a piano? Would it make a difference if I was to sit in front of a Steinway?

What if I met someone who had never seen a camera, would it be fair of me to expect him or her to produce a “Rose and Driftwood“ or something akin to “Postmen“? What if I gave that person a Hasselblad, would that help?

All silly questions to be sure. The ability to create great works comes from years of hard work. Even for the gifted. I suspect most people generally know this. Most of us know that the “overnight success” (in terms of virtuosity not marketed pop fads) was in fact, many years of blood, sweat and tears in the making.

I teach my children that while hard work does not guarantee success, no work guarantees nothing. So why is it that when it comes to understanding or appreciating art most people (at least the ones I have talked to) seem to believe that neither learning or effort is required? Is it because we all know what we like? And that’s all we need to know when it comes to looking at art right? And yet, for some, art seems to offer a window into realms that most cannot even begin to fathom. And so, just as I regret never having learnt music, I regret not realizing the benefits of learning the fine art of art appreciation sooner.

But before I continue let me make two points. First, what follows is my opinion (incomplete at best) and since I am not qualified in any way, shape or form in matters of art, this point of view sits just a bit left of useless. True to this blog, what I am presenting here is nothing more than a look into a journey of discovery. What I am trying to discover on this journey I am still not sure but instead of the proverbial Zen path up a mountain, it appears that my path is a long and twisted art gallery. In any case please accept this as a thought-in-progress. Secondly, where art is concerned I do suspect that there are many Emperors with no clothes. What I mean by that is that there is a lot of so-called art out there that does little, if anything, to enrich us on any level we care to name. This is unfortunate because the pretentiousness around art casts a shadow of doubt over the possibility that art has something substantial to offer beyond mere beauty.

In the post “Art’s value” I wrote briefly about the history of oil paintings and how out of the myriad of works produced during the 16th century only a few have been deemed the work of masters. I also wrote about some photographs being sold for large amounts of money and I mentioned that these works were valued for what they represented more than their technical value or mere aesthetic beauty.

Without a universally accepted definition for Art the task of separating masterful artworks from everything else is quite daunting. At the very least the lack of definition makes such a task subjective and places it in the hands of a few academics deemed qualified by their peers. But let’s assume for a moment that we can trust those who identify the great works from the rest, how many of us walk into  art galleries and walk out confounded? I can recall countless number of times I have stood in front of masterpieces and thought “I don’t get it” or in today’s parlance, WTF!. In such situations is the artist at fault for failing to make his intent obvious or have I failed to make myself attuned with his work?

I suspect it would be fair to say that a lot of art is created purely as a creative outlet without any intent to be deep and meaningful and I would say that this is something often overlooked by many. In other words, a lot of the time there is nothing to get. In such cases art is nothing more than a manifestation of humanity’s creative spirit. And that’s as good a reason for art as any but I know that some art goes beyond this, encapsulating a message, a feeling, a pointer to… something.

Paul Gaugin once said “Art is either plagiarism or revolution”. While not a definition for art it is a useful definition for artists. When I started to categorise artists (including photographers) as revolutionaries and plagiarists I found myself understanding art on a whole new level while gaining a little more focus on the art that matters. There is a lot of art around and more created each day. If we are to define any creative work as art then we’re talking millions of new artworks a day. But as I said, most of it is nothing more than creative spirit at play. Not a bad thing but it can be distracting.

The revolutionaries however are the ones who bring something more to the table than creative ability. They are the ones who, through their art, bring forth a shift in how we see the world. While this is not too difficult to see with hindsight, it is much less apparent with contemporary art because the contemporary revolutionary artists are seeing something the rest of us have yet to recognise. Without getting into a treatise on this topic I guess what I am trying to say is that I have gained a lot of value in spending some time reading and learning about historical artists, the ones that have been deemed masters of their art, because it has brought me a more grounded and rich enjoyment of art. It has pulled me out of ruts. It has helped me see things differently. And as a photographer it’s not only photography history that I find worth learning and reading about but any of the visual arts. The Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Pop-Artists, the Romanticists, the Post-modernists and the list goes on and on and all these styles create a rich palette of inspiration and even a different outlook. There is a reason for art—there has to be because people keep creating it regardless of whether they make money from it—and art’s true value is in art’s reason for being.

As I get to know artists and their styles, as I read their biographies and study their works (even of the ones who’s art I don’t particularly like) I find that art begins to speak to me, softly, as art does, but with conviction and coherence. And on occasions it even tells me a little something about me.

It’s all good

A cool post by Kirk Tuck at Visual Science Lab reminded me of  a discussion I had with a fellow photographer recently. As a quick post of my own I thought I would write about this little encounter.

This photographer made a point that he only shoots in manual mode. At worst, as he put it, he might occasionally use aperture mode. But apparently he would never, ever resort to auto mode. That, it would seem, was just for amateurs and phone shooters. As he was talking he was shooting. He was using live view and so I could see what he was doing. He was indeed shooting in manual mode and using two dials on the camera he was ‘manually’ setting the aperture and the shutter speed. The thing is he was changing the settings until the little arrow on the reading sat on zero. In other words he was letting the camera’s light metre determine the exposure. After watching him shoot a couple of shots it became apparent that he would first select an aperture and then match the appropriate shutter speed until the camera told him that he had the right exposure. I might be wrong on this but when I shoot in manual mode (and I rarely do these days as modern cameras are so good now) I do so because I know the light/subject combination will fool the metre. So if I am shooting a white wall in sun light I know I need to over-expose a little or the wall will come out grey.

To me, this particular photographer was shooting in auto but with a lot of unnecessary work. If he’s enjoying himself then good for him. After all, I was him once-upon-a-time. Now it just seems silly to me. Like I said, most of the time now I let the camera decide the exposure even if I decide the aperture or the shutter speed. More and more in fact, I just set the camera to auto-everything and all I do is press the shutter button. There doesn’t seem much point in doing anything else for the kind of photography I do. Which, by the way is the same kind of photography this particular guy was shooting.

Having said that I will add that I still get a kick in shooting a truly manual camera. I have had a few goes in the past year at shooting some old TLR cameras including a heavy and bulky Seagull camera. These cameras have no auto-focus, no auto-white balance, no auto-ISO, no auto-anything. And no light-metre either. The beauty of these cameras is that it slows everything down. The entire process of taking an image becomes a small labour of love, a fully immersive, creative experience. It’s as close as I get to feeling kind of arty.

As Kirk states in his post, you first need to select which film you will shoot, colour or black and white. Fuji, Kodak, Ilford? Portra, TMAX? Lots of choice. Then you need to pick the ISO. Once that film is in you can’t change those things until you finish the roll. Of course that roll of film isn’t just sitting on a shelf in the house. It’s at the local camera store so a trip to the store is in order. Then after buying the roll you have to load the film. For some reason I absolutely enjoy this moment. I place the film in the camera, feed the film onto the spindle carefully (I don’t want the film to misfeed and end up with an unexposed roll—I’m writing from experience here), I close the lid and slowly turn the handle to the first frame. Camera obscura. A darkened box with a lens, nothing more. No battery to load or charge. It’s ready to go… well kind of. Next I choose my subject. Again I need to do so with care. My skills are rusty and I cannot react as fast as I once did. I use the sunny f16 rule to determine the exposure but first I need to decide on the depth of field I wish to have. So I pick my aperture and now, using the sunny f16 rule I work out the shutter speed taking into account the ISO of the film. It’s lightly overcast and my subject is in the shadows while backlit at the same time. I go through the mental calculation and come up with an answer. Probably the wrong one. I set the shutter speed. Now the focus. My subject is about three and a half metres away, I look down through the large viewfinder. There is a little split screen to help me focus. there’s even a plastic magnifying piece I can flip up to help me get it just right. I manually turn the focusing knob near the lens until the image across the split screen lines up. Finally I am ready to press the shutter button. One last check of my composition and… oh but wait, the sun has just come out and my subject has moved out of the shadows. That’s ok, no big deal, more light means faster shutter speed. Quick re-calculation of the f16 rule and I’ve reset the shutter speed. Now I re-focus and this time I get the shot. Or did I? There is no LCD screen here. I will have to wait until I finish the entire roll of 12 and get the roll developed. It will be awhile so I get my notebook out (I could just use my smart-phone but that just seems wrong) and I write down the settings, you know, just in case I screwed up so that I can learn for next time.

Like I said, I get a kick out of doing this. I like the process, I like that it forces me to slow right down and think carefully about what I’m doing. I like that it makes me ponder the wonder of photography. And I like that I learnt photography using film. But now, for 99% of my photography, I’ll use my digital camera. I’ll revisit film whenever the opportunity arises but as much as I enjoy shooting manually, I’m also having fun shooting mindlessly. If you know what I mean.

Oh and that shot above, in case you weren’t sure, it’s digital. Cross-processed in Photoshop. And yes, I really had fun making that shot.

Photography… it’s all good.

The ethereal universe

As I sit by the water’s edge I see the reflection of an anchored boat distorted by ripples, ever-changing and yet never-ceasing to remain a reflection.

In this ethereal universe I cling to the hope that I know some things to be true but deep down I am certain of nothing. All is not lost however, because once upon a time as I was travelling back through time in the memories of the mind I sensed the ever-so-faint possibility that I was born of a big bang. An infinitely small particle of infinite mass expanding out into a nothingness that until then did not even exist. And I saw that within the act of its own creation lied the seed to its own oblivion. A thought worth cherishing for within it I saw two things to which my hope could cling. I saw beauty and I saw death.

I take a shot with my camera and in an instant I capture a tableau presented to me by an ethereal universe. It is not an image of a reflection, nor of ripples, not even of water.

It may seem a strange thing for hope to cling to but in-between beauty and death there is movement. Movement without change, for eternity can only ever be just what it is. But the movement is there, in the corner of my eye, delicate, gentle, otherworldly, almost non-existent for it only ever remains in the corner of my eye no matter how quickly I turn towards it. This movement, this motion, is the single constant in this ethereal universe. It is the beckoning of decay. And so I shed a tear of joy—or is it sadness? I am no longer sure if there is a difference—because I realise that beauty is born out of the evanescent nature of things.

This image I have captured, it is an abstract of movement, a fanciful idea of beauty that existed but for a fraction of a second, gone the instant the shutter shut out the light.

Beauty holds the seed of its own demise. It has to if it is to be recognised for what it is. And here I am, sitting precariously balanced between beauty and death seeking that ephemeral joy of creation. But to what point, to what purpose do I chase beauty if beauty is always doomed to die? I do not have the answer to that. I do not know the purpose behind this endeavour. Perhaps it is Life’s purpose to chase beauty while I, with my eyes and my camera, am simply the tracking device. A tracker of dying moments.

I continue to sit mesmerised by the myriad canvases forming before my eyes. I make a few more shots, each a new abstract, a single note in a symphony of movement. And as the light starts to disappear I stay on to catch every note. To the end when the light is gone and the water becomes too dark to be a canvas.

So this is it then? That is what life is all about? A journey from one dying moment to another until my own inevitable end? But all I want is to be happy. Happy ever after. Happy. Ever. After. Oh, but I am such a fool. Where have I seen that promise “happy ever after”? Fairy tales? Self-help books? What fools we are to believe that happiness could escape death’s attention. Happiness is no different to beauty, it’s existence recognised in its passing. And then I hear it, in the silence of the mind, a laugh… gentle… genuine… embracing. The ethereal universe, born of a big bang, laughing gently at the wonder of it all.

The water is now but a dark shadow. I stand and with one last look I turn my back and leave. What a day it has been. What beauty I have seen. What sadness I have felt. Ethereal bliss indeed.

Art’s value

"Brisbane (Tricycle)" by me

Recently, a William Eggleston photographic print of a tricycle (see below) was sold for over $500,000 dollars. When I told some non-photographer friends of mine about it I was surprised to find that it left them somewhat unimpressed. Admittedly they didn’t know William Eggleston and didn’t know what photograph I was talking about and these days the fact that someone pays half a million dollars for something as seemingly trivial as a photograph is nothing to write home about. Apparently. Me, well, I still get bewildered by this sort of thing but for another reason I’ll get to later. Anyway, I happened to have a copy of the “Memphis (Tricycle)” photograph on my phone and I showed it to my friends. Well, suddenly they all became fascinated and agitated and quite resentful. One of the reactions was “Half a million bucks for an Instagram photo? You’ve got to be kidding!” and another comment was “My six-year-old could take a better photo than that”.

These reactions are not unusual. I have at some point, looked at some abstract painting of randomly splashed-about paint blobs and thought to myself “Oh please, I could do that”. And I am confident I am not alone. The thing about art though, is that no one has ever said it has to be complicated, difficult, intricate or that it required unfathomable amounts of skill. Considering that no one has come up with a globally accepted definition for Art and that there is still some contention about photography’s place in the art world, it’s not all that surprising that some people feel indignant about these ostensibly ridiculous dollar values placed on so-called artworks.

I actually like Eggleston’s work including his tricycle photograph. I like the dynamics of the composition, I like the colours, I like the simplicity, I like the memories it evokes. Some of my friends also liked this particular photograph but of course they still couldn’t get their heads around someone paying half a million dollars for it. By all accounts this is an average photograph and not the work of some Master. I don’t argue with this notion. But there is a reason why this photograph (along with 35 others) went for such a preposterous sum of money. The value is in what the image represents. The value is in the actual moment in time that it captured.

Talking about time, allow me to digress and to take us back in time if I may. Back to the 16th century. Long before photography and around the time when oil paintings came into their own as an art form. It’s worth mentioning that oil painting had been around long before this particular period but it was in the 1500′s that oil painting established its own way of seeing the world. This was also a time when art started to be seen as objects that could be purchased and owned. And each piece was understood to be unique. That alone is significant and had far-reaching consequences.

Oil paintings of this period reflected how the world was seen. During the Renaissance there were many who were flushed with money and this wealth which translated itself into grand homes, land holdings, jewellery, clothes and other worldly possessions, was expressed visually in oil paintings. Oil paintings were the Instagram images of the Renaissance. Please forgive my irreverence but that’s my take on it. The thing is, during this period, there were hundreds of thousands of oil paintings produced and bought. So many have since been lost, of those that survived a few have been considered fine art and of those only a small portion are deemed to have been created by the so-called “Masters”.

At this stage let me say that I’m guilty of glossing over the finer details as well as over-simplifying the significance of this grand period in art history but I fear that I would bore most people if I dwelt on it any longer (assuming I haven’t already). In any case, the questions that came to mind when I first read about this fascinating epoch were quite complex. As it turned out. I mean, who was responsible for separating the work of the Masters from the chaff? What criteria did they use to differentiate a Von Aachen from whoever else didn’t make the cut? Why did Da Vinci and Rubens and Rembrandt become household names (well, in my house at least) while thousands of others didn’t?

Sadly I am not an expert, either as an artist or as an appraiser of Art but over the years I’ve come to understand to some small degree the little nuances that makes one artist or a particular piece of art stand out from the rest. As far as I can tell it comes down to seeing. Not my seeing so much as the  artist’s. These outstanding artists saw things slightly differently, perhaps even more clearly, then their colleagues. And they had the skills, the ability and the courage, to express this view of the world in their work. And if all artworks are unique then the artworks created by the Masters are specially unique. They mark a moment in time when someone saw something no one had noticed before. And in so doing those artists typified and immortalised their moment in time.

That, is what Eggleston is credited for. That, is what his photographs, his colour photographs of common objects are deemed to represent. A moment in time when something changed and he saw it in a way that was different, back then, when it mattered. When black and white images gave way to colour, when the mundane needed to be seen anew, when art needed to be redefined so that it might show us the hidden in a manner that was relevant and contemporary. And that, dare I say, is what makes his work unique and rare and history has shown us that rarity, along with desirability, is what makes people want to own things so badly that they will pay a small fortune for it. And that is what bewilders me, not the sums involved but that the value of Art is merely a matter of supply and demand. A commodity judged primarily by its monetary worth, placing all or Art’s value into a price tag. That is mind-boggling to me but that, is a whole other topic.

"Memphis (Tricycle)" - by William Eggleston

Now, I wonder how my friends would have reacted if I’d shown them “Rhein II”by Andreas Gursky which sold for $4,338,500.

Andreas Gursky, "Rhein II", 1999, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering, I’m willing to part with my “Brisbane (Tricycle)” photograph shot with my phone—not using Instagram—for the bargain price of $100,000. A steal, right?

Nothing has changed but the noise

Back in the days before the Internet
it was quite a task
finding the new deep thinkers and visionary artists.
Today nothing has changed except now,
there seems to be more noise.

Into the river of thougths

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I stopped writing was due to an idea that words hinder rather than help explain certain concepts including the idea of “seeing”. But a number of people have kindly pointed out that this idea may be flawed and I will readily admit that what I perceive as the inadequacy of words is more likely an ineptitude in my own abilities to bring forth such concepts into the right light. So it is with this understanding that I will continue to write and hope that at some point my vision will become clear enough in my own eyes that I may be able to share it in some truly meaningful way.

The idea of seeing, truly seeing things as they are, is important to me. Why? I am not sure though it is a question that would deserve its own exploration. Also I cannot say whether it was this idea that led me to photography. It may easily have been the other way round; I do not remember. Whatever the whys and hows I have a strong suspicion that once upon a time I would have seen things exactly as they are with no judgements, biases or filters. Back when words were merely sounds falling upon my ears and dissolving into silence with no more meaning than the sound of rain falling or floorboards creaking. Such a time was back when I was an infant. Seeing came before words but since then, seeing most often comes with a flood of thoughts— inherently made up of words—which rush by if I am lucky or, if I’m not so lucky, get caught up in eddies and whirls that inadvertently take my attention away from the pure act of seeing.

So why would this river of thoughts be so disruptive to the simple act of seeing? After all there are times—notably when I have a camera in hand— when this river is almost still with barely a ripple across its surface. The trouble is that even if the flow is totally stopped, there is one thing that the advent of words brought to that infant all those years ago. Words, along with their meanings, brought separation. The child stopped seeing things purely as they are and started seeing things in relation to himself. At that point the child became aware that it was him that was seeing and that he could therefore also be seen. At that point the child could no longer see just one thing, he would for evermore see a thing and its relationship to himself. And as words brought knowledge into his life and that knowledge formed into beliefs, the child became all grown up and forgot how to to simply see things just as they are.

At this point it is tempting for me to say that Art can help restore the ability to see things as the infant sees the world and I admit that I think of this as Art’s purpose (at least in part) but it is not quite so simple. The trouble is that I can only view art as I view anything else; I see the art and its relation to myself. Even more maddening I cannot help but also see my relationship to the art’s message. Not to mention the artist’s relationship to me. The easy way out of this dilemma is to say something like, it shows how all things are linked, how there is just oneness or some other new-age claptrap but it would mean little beyond some abstract understanding of some metaphysical philosophy. After all, it may even be possible for art to lead me astray if I am to confuse the artwork or the image for the real thing.

One of my favourite artists is René Magritte. Magritte was a surrealist painter who became famous for a number of thought-provoking artworks including a painting called “La trahison des images” (“The treachery of images”) which depicts a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe“ (“This is not a pipe”). While he was reproached for this apparent absurdity he was simply stating the obvious; the drawing of the pipe is indeed, not a pipe but merely a representation of a pipe.

A perfectly valid question to ask at this point would be: so what? And the only answer I can give at this time is: I am not sure. I am not sure why this matters or if it matters at all. But sometimes I’ll see something, something common or mundane, something I see every day but I see it in a way I have never seen it before. It lasts but a moment, right up to the point where I get swept away by the rapids that is my river of thoughts.

Will this “seeing” make me an artist? I doubt it.

Will it help me make better photos? Probably not.

Can it change my life in any way? Well… yes, it does… subtly, ever so subtly.

It brings form to my emotions. It puts meaning into insignificant actions. It sheds light on deep memories. Because after such moments, when I am back into the river of thoughts, I realise that what I am now looking at is just a label formed by knowledge, manipulated by beliefs all of which come from experiences that together make up this story I call my life. In other words, by seeing the present clearly, I start to understand the past and how it got me to where I am right now, right here.

Magritte - The Treachery of Images