Who's The Artist Here?

<- Click here
Walt Whitman, America's first savage poet wrote, "I do not doubt but the majesty & beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world... I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed..."

Do you think it's true that when you photograph something, you make it important, at least to you? It seems as if the photographers who get into museums today rarely picture romantic or lyrical subjects. Instead the seem to focus upon the painful, vulgar, and plain parts of overlooked debris.

This statue sits in the entryway of the Papal Museum in Rome. It sits beside steps leading up to the museum shop. It's modern, colored, beautifully executed and a stylized representation of a modern messenger in business suit and tie with long red locks and as shoeless as the ancient prophets. I could have stepped back and shown it to you in a sort of visual stenography. I didn't, instead, trained by modern photographers, here it is in its astonishingly well executed parts. They may be iotas of the artist work, but unlike the trash cans which some photographic artists are showing in world class museums, I find these parts hugely moving.

Do you? Or should I have reproduced the whole work as the sculpture intended. But if I had, would this edition of ImageFiction be about my feelings, ideas, and conclusions - or someone else's? And does that matter? I guess it goes back to the question, what is photographic art?