One of my favorite writer/photographers, Kenneth Dixon recently published this article about....photography. Go read?
https://www.orartswatch.org/the-photographers-notes-a-magic-trick/
I've read several of his books and each one was revelatory....or at least struck home.
This article is a nice, short read that might resonate with you. KT
His writing eclipses his photography imho. Enjoyed his article.
ReplyDeleteEric
An interesting article, but somehow it ends up sounding like an artist’s statement.
ReplyDeleteI agree with some of the things he said, and, of course, disagree with others. I was most interested in the Janet Malcolm paragraph about her visit with David Salle. She comments that “I have never found anything an artist has said about his work interesting.” I've been reading a lot lately about Cezanne, and one of the more interesting commentaries was in an old book published around 1930, which ridicules the comments Cezanne makes about his own work. The author clearly demonstrates (IMHO) that Cezanne, though a brilliant painter, had no idea of what he was talking about when he tried to theorize about painting, even his own painting. A lot of his comments are self-contradictory, and other are simply stupid or incomprehensible. Many critics are the same way -- they really have no good idea of what they are talking about. Painting and art photography are much more like plumbing than they are like any kind of theory.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not only in art enterprises do you find things like this. I golf, and I have a book about putting written by a serious golf researcher. He says that Jack Nicklaus, probably the greatest golfer ever, often said that he tried to "die his putts in the hole." That is, to ease them up to the hole and then let them fall in. The researcher says that after looking at film and video of Nicklaus putting, he realized that the man had no idea of what he was talking about. When Nicklaus missed a putt, it almost invariably wound up eighteen inches or two feet beyond the hole, rather than dying next to the hole. He was a great putter, but his theorizing sucked. Even his own beliefs about what he was doing were incorrect.
“The essential function of a good photograph is to enrich the experience of reality.” And good photography captures your soul.
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