Sunday, October 4, 2009

As this is a blog, and not a website where the posted work should be the best one can make, this entry is just a "for instance". It's an example of the dilemma that confronts the photographer who is still loyal to the imperatives of modernism as defined by Adams, Weston, and their legions of disciples who continue to make photographs in that tradition to this day. But also, a photographer who's imagination is entertained by revisiting the pictorialists and their many modern practitioners who've reinvented that art and revitalized it. "Alt processes" now inhabit the photographic landscape in significant numbers, perhaps because artists demand to have a robust and active hand in making their art rather than to have to slavishly serve the authors of algorithms.

The pictures below are two versions of the same scene at nearly the same time. I had gotten to this place (Lakes Road beside the east end of Walton Lake...that's in "upstate" Orange County, New York, folks) just a bit too late for the excellent light that had been there moments before. I decided to play with selective focus, and sharp focus because I'm more and more intrigued by the former after being addicted to the latter for most of my work. Were the light on the foreground leaves, the top image would have been the clear choice for me. As it had just disappeared, the bottom 'graph made sense because of the graphic values that remained. Neither will be likely to ever be printed, but these have value to me as lessons learned...or at least considered. And, the exercise serves as one more invitation to be more playful and experimental. It's an amusing mystery to imagine what my posts might look like two years from now....Yikes!







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