The Online Photographer

Of course the problem if you are an impressionable youth with a camera is that the obvious thing to do is take a lot of pictures of really really mundane stuff.

"Hey look at this great picture of Keith Richards' shoes and Captain Kangaroo's shadow "

I disagree! That quote reflects the common hubris of many artists.

It's not the music, it's the performance - that's why, in classical music concert posters, the performer name is printed in big, the composer names in medium, and composition names in small font, if at all. It's why theatre plays must be radically re-interpreted in the director's own style. The original play is just raw material, incomplete and uninteresting on it's own. In movies, the director and actors are important, the screenwriter is not. Literature, visual arts, it really is true everywhere.

I say that not very much true art has been produced with that mindset. The true artist is enthralled by his subject, he sees past it's seeming mundaneness and obviousness, that's why he's the artist.

"The great example of this that I can think of off the top of my head is Edward Weston, who made art out of a ceramic toilet ("Excusado") and a bell pepper ("Pepper No. 30") as well as a great many other mundane subjects."

I'm not sure I agree. Both are common objects, but the prejudice that they are necessarily less interesting than their photographs I'm not willing to accept without further consideration.

Might the enduring interest in them be in part because they are such perfect evocations of things inherently of interest to most people. Sort of B&W Platonic ideals in which we can see the beauty of their true forms.

Perhaps Weston's talent lay not only in being able to make exquisite, tonally gorgeous prints, but in recognizing subjects that would be inherently interesting to most people and making beautiful images of them as ideals.

The unanswered question in my mind has always been whether it was a green pepper, which is much less interesting to me, or a luscious red one. A problem with B&W.

Then there are all the photographs of his wife, in many of which the subject transcends the photograph - to this male.

Late Night Rambler Moose

I would say that Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter (and many other great landscape photographers) have created extraordinary images that are beautiful in their own right but do not come close to to being "MORE interesting" than their subject.

More interesting than the Grand Canyon (Yosemite, High Sierra, etc.) would be impossible in my estimation.

However I love when a photograph reinterprets its subject and encourages me to view it with new appreciation and insight.

"A photograph should be more interesting than the subject and transcend its obviousness."

And yet who among us, armed with a camera, can avoid snapping utterly unimaginative but irresistible obviousness occasionally? Sunset lakes, anyone?

The value of all art is a matter of opinion.

That's what makes it interesting and annoying at the same time.