Part II: Can you feel it?

Last night’s queries having given way to sleep; this morning’s sunrise has given way to suspicion. There must be more to the story than that.

When I lived in China, I came across a curious phenomenon. That curiosity was soon lost, replaced with a hopeless acceptance of the inevitable. A copy-this-format culture will inevitably lead to technically beautiful, emotion-less art.

Allow me to explain. Sitting and listening to friends, students, and friends’ children play the piano, I found one thing was true nearly across the board—these children played the piano with technical rigor, agility, and precision. There was often nearly nothing wrong with their pieces, technically speaking. They were perfect, but were they “好听?” That is to say, were they beautiful to listen to? Not really. Were they moving? No. There was no passion. There was no intimacy with the composer. There was nothing but flat notes on a 2-dimensional staff… only this and nothing more.

So take this phenomenon back to photography and think it through again. I have seen beautiful, precise, well-exposed photos; photos whose creators have taken the time to set the scene, check the lighting, and even done a bit of editing (“Kosher,” could-be-done-in-a-darkroom editing) to make their photos shine. I know people personally who have taken (technically) absolutely stunning photos, and I have even “liked” some of those photos… but are they 好看? Are they beautiful to look at? Well… yes and no. It comes back to the same issue—they are technically beautiful and emotionally distant. When I consider them at first, I find them stunning in their precision, but given a few minutes I find them cold, despite the warm red of an Anzac Day poppy. They are flat, emotion-less, two-dimensional representations of skill with no heart.

And so we come to part two—what is art if you cannot feel it? Is their beauty with rough edges? Is there beauty without emotion? Can art be technically beautiful but emotionally lifeless, or does “art” require both to be… well… art?

More old questions… your thoughts, as always, are welcome.
(Written on Sunday... finally posted today.)

“It’s not art until somebody says it is.” “IT’S ART!!”

I’ve been thinking lately about art, or, more specifically, photography.

As an avid peruse-er of the week in photos on the BBC’s front page; an on-again-off-again reader of the Lens Blog (NYTimes); and an avid amateur with a little digital Canon, I find myself often thinking about this art-form… this photography phenomenon of our generation.

Photography used to be something left to those who understood words like “F-stop” and “exposure time” and the odd “hot shoe” reference. It was left to people who could change lenses, catch the right light, and would be willing to wait for the right expression… the right look on a child’s face, the desired positioning of the moon over the ridge line, or the stretched flat wings of a swallowtail. They were the ones who understood the contrast necessary for black and white photos to look… "good." And they made art.

Today, photography is much simpler. One could say it has become a mass medium of art… and the masses are enjoying. Today you don’t buy a macro lens; you push that little flower button on the camera. Today you don’t turn up the shutter speed for your kid’s football match; you turn the dial to that picture of a little guy running. The camera will do the rest. Fancy, that.

Certainly one of the biggest changes to the medium is the price of film. It now costs nothing—that is, nothing but some hard drive space. This makes taking frame upon frame of friends, poorly lined up, red-eyed, drunk-looking, and uploading them to the social networking site of your choice, tagging them with names (links) and leaving commentary all the easier. What happened to the day when junk pictures hit the trash bin? I suppose these odd pictures of backs and blur are here to stay… for now.

So I step back and consider the “art” that is all around me and I wonder if this is the loss of an art-form, or just the inevitable change that takes place when “art” reaches the level of the unwashed masses who’ve never studied the theory or the “rules,” they just like to take pictures. People, like myself, with a camera and some friends and a home in an interesting, beautiful place.

Take for example the photos below:

One of them is available here. The other is available on my hard drive. Which one is art? Do we have to choose? Is the NatGeo photo art simply because those with some authority have chosen to publish it—the right people have said, ‘IT’S ART!’ Is that all the qualification it needs?

What about these two:

One of them is available from NatGeo.

And what about these two? One was published in Time Magazine for a story on adoption… the other’s just a shot of typical Hunan, Feng Huang.

I don't have any particular photography skills, but those three that aren't linked are mine. Are they art? And if so, whose pictures aren't?

These thoughts all come on the heels of two recent NYTimes blog entries. The first, found here http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/iowa-bird-story/, chronicles the photographer’s (artist’s?) attempts to capture a beautiful, 114-year old woman in a photo. How do you take a photo worthy of America’s oldest living resident? Is there a photo worthy of the beauty of this woman?

The second, found here at the Lens Blog http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/readers-11/, appropriately, talks about an interesting experiment that will take place tomorrow morning for me, tonight for those of you in the Middle Kingdom—capturing a moment in time. I like the sound of that.

‘Attention: everyone with a camera, amateur or pro,” they write. “Please join us on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 (U.T.C./G.M.T.), as thousands of photographers simultaneously record “A Moment in Time.” The idea is to create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time.’ Makes you want to grab your camera and take part, doesn’t it? Well, I say go for it…

But the question remains… with the proliferation of art, does it lose some of its value; is the value in the rarity? Is there greater value in a slowly assembled and considered photograph than there is in my quick snapshots, even if the quality, color, and composition were comparable? Is there greater inherent value in that one family photo taken when grandpa was 5 than there is in another photo of an assemblage of neighborhood kids covered in mud and playing gleefully? Where is the line drawn between art and… not art?

Is photography losing its value as a medium given the proliferation of simplification, the mass-produced imitations, and the wannabe Ansel Adamses?

It’s an old question… and your thoughts are welcome.