Got A Question For You

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I've been wondering... What is the use of art? Matching the couch? Covering a hole in he wall? I know that a large number of furry little rodents decorate their burrows. Ditto the way a lot of birds weave stuff into their nests. Hmmmm.... are some animals driven to decorate? How do they decide between worthwhile decorations and junk?Are there more, um, fascinating decorations? Do some decorations resonate more than others? Is there a collection instinct? If there is, upon what is it focused? How do collectors of decoration decide? Do they have advisors? Are there experts? Critics? Educators? Analysts?

Apparently all human cultures collect art just like those cute rodents. Even ancient peoples seem, well, driven to decorate their graves with shiny things, drawings and statues. Decoration seems to be almost a necessary condition of human-ness.

So what are the uses of art? Body decoration? Balancing the palette in a bathroom? Is the value the picture, or inside the picture? Is art an object or a package?

Okay... my head is hurting now. Think I'll go find a Rolling Rock.

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Oh yeah, the picture here: I took it at dawn in Wellfleet on Cape Cod as the tide gurgled in under my feet. It actually does gurgle and hiss, oozing seemingly out of the muddy ground. Charming though, and it makes the sort of picture that blown up and framed... Well it goes pretty damned well with the couch, huh? :)

Sidney Sees

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Sidney does not see
What we see.
Instead his world is felt
Inside his mind where
Sidney repairs a future
That will be different
From what we see
When it happens.

Fisherman Wharf Muscle Workers

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Master photographer Craig Tanner started this with an image he posted on February 14th. Click here to check Craig's image out and read the title closely. I posted a comment on that Tanner image and since then I've been on the lookout for sort of the same thing a continent away from Craig's Savannah morning.

So? Wuddaya think? Gotcha covered in San Francisco Craig... No need to travel 3,000 miles, right?

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And here's the as-usual original...

Amateur Standing

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So I'm wondering: is there a fine line between photographic art and unsalable imagery? Art is what the art establishment says it is. I'm not upset by that, just realistic. For example, would Andy Warhol's "Brillo Boxes" have sold in the 17th, or 18th centuries? What art is... is not determined by artists, right? So if you want to sell art, you have to look up the definition du jour and do that. Or you need to skitter together some of the people who are in charge of the definition today and get them to go, like, "Whoa! Yeah Baby, you give good art.! Let me sell it for you, okay?"

Take for example Andreas Serriano's "Piss Christ" - a very large super sharp color photograph of a crucifix floating in a glass jug of urine. The original is said to be magnificently lit, and the amber fluid creates mysterious glimmerings and..... And it not only would not have sold in the 1600s, Serriano would have hung. Which brings me back to my question, is there a fine line between photographic art and unsalable imagery? And do you have to be on the Serriano side of that line today to attract an audience that will part with money? And is parting with money the final arbiter of whether a work is ultimately both art and good? Or is there still a role for Amateur Standing?

If there is, I'm there: with images like this I created from a rainy morning at the Salty Dog's docks along Hilton Head's inlet.

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Here's what the original looked like to my camera...
GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, 6/3/07,7:24 AM: Lens 17-85mm, Focal Length: 30mm, Exp 1@f/25, ISO 400, Metering Mode: Auto, Exposure bias -1.67, Camera RAW

Why Not A Post Card?

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How many galoots with Instamatics took this picture from this same bridge looking up the Tiber toward Adrian's Tomb? Why did I take it? I just saw a similarly shabby version of it in a ghastly written article in this month's Photoshop User Magazine. Do you realize how much I could have saved by just scanning that thing instead of schlepping off to Rome? I can think of no way to pull something original out of this cliché.

Can you? Hulp?

NOTE: You will often find in-depth descriptions of this Italian visit among the comments below both as I add onto them and as you prompt my memory. I'll try to restrict my thoughts exclusively to today's image here on the home page. Those comments begin here. To follow the thread chronologically start at October 7th.

Wheels #5: The End

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Of course, in a pinch, there's always one last way to deal with a sun-drenched image (See the texts from September, 10-14). Just move the puppy to a friendlier spot, like this. See, the sun dappling looks like street-light dappling and it solves the problem, right? Actually when I saw this old rumble seat open - I imagined it all set to fill up with a happy couple for a night ride through the downtown. I have vague memories as a kid of riding in somebody's ancient but restored jalopy with my Mom in one of those things. Wind-in-hair it was a giggly ride for little boy, like an amusement park attraction that ran right down my street and into the driveway. Wheeeee!

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But when I got to digging into the image it provoked an addtional thought. Don't you think this was the kind of car that the owners took down to the Lancaster Municipal docks to work on their boat? Doesn't it look right out there next to one of the smaller craft? From shore to ship, the perfect way to end my Wheels week, don't you think?

GEEK STUFF Sunday 9/9/07 1:41pm: 1/80s@f/7.1 : Canon EOS 20D, Meter Mode Auto, Exposure Program: Normal, ISO 200, Lens: Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), Focal Length 33 mm, Exposure Bias:-0.33, RAW: PP in PS-CS3

Quie-Ted #2

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Awaiting Fall

Neglected Or Abandoned?

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Was the owner of this boat too lazy to pluck it from the lake? Or does he live year-round and nearby enough to still pull the tarp and use it on occasion? He must have expected the lake to freeze very soon. And there was no bubbler anywhere around the hull of this craft.
Still that tarp was a custom job and expensive. Who knows where #89 would be when winter closed down the mountain. There's something hauntingly lonely about this image. I don't so much get the feeling of neglect as abandonment. You agree?

If It Ain't Baroque

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Suppose you could see radio waves. You would be blind. Ditto if you could see air. But if you could see the the contrasts between light and dark forces that held the smooth and broken surfaces of colors to the shapes all about us... What would you be then? How would you see the world? Would you see the cables that kept everything together? Have you ever noticed, out of the corner of an eye, something just a tad odd. No, not odd, say, out of place?
Imagine you're here, at Lake Harmony and a rising sun's about to explode from last night's storm clouds. And in the dramatic contrast between night and emerging day, for the briefest instant... you sense there are strands, wires, aerial ligaments that tie everything to everything... and then they are gone. Whoa! Crank down the Vivaldi, Dude.

Stumped

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Is there spiritual essence in a stump? Look at that thing, it's probably a lot older than any of us. And it will be there for a couple of hundred years or so, unless someone finds a need to pull it. A century from now the machine saw marks will still look fresh as if they were cast in concrete. Who cut this thing? Why? There are cottages behind me as I took this picture. Did this pine obstruct someone's view? Not enough apparently to finish the job, just enough to get the thing hacked but not low enough to do anything else with this plot of ground.
Yeah, I think there is a spiritual essence to this corpse-that-won't-decompose. Unlike you or I, it's body will survive the snows and the searing suns. And it'll poke itself out of that rocky ground long after its killer's body has bio-degraded. Maybe that's the payback, eh? Maybe that's the essence of the hardy old stump's spirit?

Harmony

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Lake Harmony is in the Pocono Mountains, about 25 miles south of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It's a place that time forgot. Everything's nicely maintained, or built to feel as if you've driven through a shimmering door into the 1950s. We ate at a restaurant last night, "Shenanigans," where every area is a smoking area! It's as if the post WWII people have been preserved in some kind of patina. Nothing at Lake Harmony's seedy, or ratty, or uncool. And it isn't a museum of any sort. People there seem to have simply decided that they want to live in Eisenhower's America but out in the woods. So they do it with iPods, DVDs, and washer-dryers. The whole place is built around this lake that started to attract summer people in the 1920s as cars got popular.

In Philadelphia back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, they had a name for the Poconos... During the steamy, city months, they called it, "Air Conditioning". Here's an image from this morning as the sun cracked through a snow spattering sky.

Mysti

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Back in the primitive years of slides and negatives and waiting at the mailbox, we had this problem. We had to wonder what 36, 72 or more shots would look like when the mail arrived. And we'd pour through things we felt were sure masterpieces, only to feel our hopes go flaccid. But then, in that small yellow box, if we were really lucky there'd be something like this.

Now the only way to go back to that place at low tide is to pull out the fading Kodachromes. They are like tiny colored portals to a time that was thirty years ago. And any poetry that the moment made, is turning golden and darkening just a certainly as the old mages.