[Leica] Art Work.

[Jeff Moore <jbm@oven.com>]

2000-02-16-11:53:04 Mike Johnston:
> But art doesn't deserve study?

That's the point, isn't it?  I fear that people often have an
unfortunate tendency to assume that works in any medium they feel they
can operate in at least competently -- say, photography or prose -- must
always be be obvious to create or understand.  This isn't necessarily
the case.

I recall taking a marathon drawing course a couple of years ago.  Two
weeks, eight hours of drawing a day, critiques into the night.  I
can't say that I'm any good, really, at drawing even now -- but I
came away knowing a lot more than I had about *looking* at drawings.
Many of the students produced work which just would've bounced off my
eyeballs before the course, because I didn't really know enough to find
a foothold.  I came to appreciate some of them as producing interesting,
complex, layered pieces which required a great deal of effort and talent
to make, and *which rewarded work applied to looking at them*.  I got a
notion of just how much I *don't* know, and how deep the knowledge of
some youngsters 15 years my junior was.

One aspect -- not the only one, but an aspect -- of what was going on
is that most of the full-time students at this school shared a language
derived from years of looking at the work of past few centuries'
painters and draughtsmen.  Just as the most rewarding novels aren't
merely a set of declarative sentences whose only interest lies in the
facts they describe, but instead depend on conjuring up echoes of social
and literary context the author and readers share, so it is with other
forms.

I fear that my photos are pretty glib and obvious, when held to this
standard;  but I hope that I'll continue to get better at it over the
*next* 25 years trying to work a camera.

I recommend John Szarkowski's classic "Looking at Photographs" (now
thankfully back in print!) for some examples of the discipline of
working at looking at photos.  There's absolutely no guarantee you'll 
always agree with him, but that's actually pretty much beside the
point.