Oceans of ink

Oceans of ink have been wasted till now to define, discuss, analyse, decompose and reassemble terms as Art and Photography, especially the joint use of both terms, namely “art in photography” or “artistic photography”.  

What has been written so far is more than enough to lead to nothing, so, take a look here or here to have a starting point, make your own judgments and keep your own perspective.

Basically someone told that “there are artists who are photographers and photographers who don’t know what is Art”.

It is not difficult guess that there is a plethora of the latter, but only a very restricted ensemble of the former. You can see tons and tons of images (some of astonishing beauty), but in an ultimate analysis they are mere “photographic technique” masterpieces or examples of the luck to be in the right place at the right moment.

Photography, Art, Creation & Reality

No matter the beauty of the image, you should ask yourself : “Where is the creation process of the author ? ”.

Regardless the aesthetic value, it is difficult find “Art”  in an image, if you do not recognise in it any output of material that is compelled by a personal drive and echoes or reflects a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret.

No genuine creative effort is embedded in expression forms which do not try modify reality. It is hard to recognise a creative process in images reporting reality “as it is”; at most they might be a technical exercise which could be performed by a trained monkey as well.

An example can help to clarify the difference between photography technique and creative process.  Open the example HERE.

I would just add a short consideration about what is my own viewpoint about the use of photography as a mean to represent concepts end internal visions. My effort is steered toward the translation of a mood into what would have been the REAL image seen by one hypothetic eye having the same joint characteristics of the camera and of the film. Therefore my work is not based on post-processing, image modifications, tricks, manipulations, Photoshop stuff or anything else but the pure and only shoot itself. These tools are used here only to overcome budget and logistic limitations in making shots.

Reality is often limited, trivial and tone-less, far from being able to directly represent what is in a creative mind. So my major effort is both to modify reality to let the latent image impressed on the film match what it was intended to represent in my mind.

As reality modification is the basic brick of my creative process, my work can maybe viewed as photograpy of "ephemeral sculptures". Indeed I feel that this broad definition could fit.

After all the above mental jerks, Zefram Cochrane hopes that you can spend an interesting half an hour browsing the projects and the experiments.