Seeing things differently.
Dragon.
I’ll be the first to admit this. I do not understand Contemporary Photography or Art. When I visited NY last year, visits to Chelsea Art Galleries often had me going, WTF is that? Can wads of chewing gum on a canvas pass off as Art?
If photography is an Art, how do we define it? Or do we define it at all? In Mauricio Alejo’s class over the weekend, he mentioned that Photography’s primary function is still to document, no matter you’re a documentary or contemporary or fashion photographer. We are all documenting. You could be documenting an great moment in mankind, an idea or the hottest trend. Strangely, this self reasoning suddenly puts contemporary photography into perspective for myself. Pictures are an archive of information. The idea of Indexal and Iconic pictures came in play. Indexal pictures were explained as eg, a photo of a foot print. An example of Iconic picture was of Gregory Crewdson’s where the idea came before the picture and the picture was constructed to show the idea. I’m not sure that the word “idea” explains the concept. Point of View? Vision? Hmm….
I’m still trying to process that mind cramping session that we had. Lots of information and theories were discussed. It did make the assignment of reading a chapter in Susan Sontag’s On Photography a little easier. Though I’m still trying to string all this information together and try to see the big picture.
At the end of class, I was reminded that I love looking at paintings and I don’t rationalised paintings when I look at them as compared to lookinng at Photographs. I enjoy a painting just because of the way it makes me feel. I remember seeing Picasso’s painting of Torso in SAM and going “wow, cubes also can show a human body and how strong that body felt.” Maybe it’s time for me to think less and just enjoy the photos and let them speak to me instead of trying to rationalise what was the message behind the photos.
“At one end of the spectrum, photographs are objective data; at the end, they are items of psychological science fiction.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography.