Just to let you know

The Landscapist is moving along right smartly for a newbie blog. The blog is averaging about 120 page loads a day. Visitors to the blog are coming back for return visits - more than 3/4s of the unique daily views are from returning visitors and they are coming from all points on the compass - Iceland, Turkey, Spain (Ministry of Defense server), England, Ireland, Argentina, Germany, Italy, and all across the US and Canada.

My only wish is for more comments and photo submissions from a broader base of visitors - it will make for a livelier blog. ALL POINTS OF VIEW - COMMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY-WISE - ARE WELCOME.

Many many thanks to those who have participated to date.

ku # 425

Just thinking out loud.

Artistically well-grounded ideas of reality?

re: The phrase artistically well-grounded idea of reality - The Katrina aftermath photographs of Dan Burkholder and Katherine Wolkoff are attracting a fair amount of attention. Both have taken "artistic" licence with the subject - Burkholder to a much more dramatic degree (extreme HDR treatment) than Wolkoff, who works in the Joel Meyerwitz Cape Light?Aftermath tradition.

Either way, the photographs are quite beautiful.

Katherine Wolkoff - click through the slide show to see the Katrina photos. Dan Burkholder - a gallery with some Katrina (New Orleans) photos (click to enlarge).

Wolkoff is featured in the Fall 2006 issue of Aperture. Burkholder, along with a detailed description of his HDR techniques, is featured in the Sept/Oct issue of Camera Arts.

Any thoughts?

ku # 424 and a commentary for your consideration

Click Doubleclick - the title of a photography show at Munich's Haus der Kunst. Click, as in camera shutter, Doubleclick, as in computer mouse. The exhibition "...does not simply examine documentary photography as it is affected by the digital revolution; it looks at the very basis of photography, which is rooted both in the world and in documentary realism..." (from a review of the show by Gerry Badger in Aperture, Fall 2006).

One conculsion reached by the exhibition's curator, Thomas Weski, is that photography is no longer (if it ever was) a matter of simply making a simulacrum of what is in front of you, in the computer age it is "...not so much a matter of portrayal or representation of reality, but rather of an artistically well-grounded idea of the world."

Mary Dennis ~ If I were a bush

I wouldn't want to live at McDonald's.

Photopop 7.0 ~ New Wave Man

Taking a break from all the big words, and long books on photography (no offense), I'd like to add a little gen-next inspiration...I would consider myself gen-x, this is newer.

In the words of Paul Rueubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, from his cameo as a coke addicted psych-ward escapee in Cheech & Chong's Nice Dreams.. "new wave man, newwww wave."

In the most beautiful (and only) collaboration of photography, art, animation, and sound, 99 rooms is an adventure through a cyberspace installation like I've never seen.

The object is to interact and find your way through 99 rooms (photographed from the abandoned warehouses of east berlin's industrial district) by finding knobs, valves or objects that activate the cursor from an arrow to a hand icon. After clicking on said object, the cursor will become an arrow with 3 forward triangles(?) this means you can skip to the next room. Be advised though, that sometimes there is more to discover on these pages by simply mousing over items and making tails wag, eyes wink, and flowers bloom. So no need to hurry through from page to page. Sometimes the sounds change and items or creatures appear over time too,and sometimes not. All in all, an genuine jewel of an exhibit!

enjoy,

99rooms

blog publisher's comment This is what I get for raising my kid(s) as a free thinker. But seriously, 99rooms, at first glance, has a very "Myst" feeling to it - god, how many hours did I spend in that room? - and it really can be spell-binding to explore. Not sure what it "means" but Hugo's going to spend some time "exploring" it while he's at my house this wekend.

Photopop 7.0 ~ When Amateurs Attack

An interesting photo taken in broad daylight by an amateur photographer experimenting with the f-stop/ISO stuff. Granted it was taken during the approach of a nasty tropical storm in the carribean. There was more light than this but because of the high ISO there is too much grain to lighten any of the shadows. I really like it as is though. The storm had us locked in for a few days and really was ferocious.

I imagined sitting alone in that chair next to that huge tree once the storm began.

blog publisher advisory Monitor calibration is rather critical on this one.

FEATURED COMMENT:Mary Dennis wrote, This is a tough one photopop. However, as I viewed it late last night (I couldn't sleep) in complete darkness except for the monitor's light, it was quite a different experience than viewing it in daylight. It felt like it could be part of a dream and those chair legs were rather haunting. You are testing the limits here and that's exciting in and of itself.

Good News

I am delighted to report that, after a very brief stay at the clinic, Hugo has finaly gone cold turkey and kicked the habit. Now that he is clean at 26 months, he has declared himself to be, "no baby, big kid."

ku # 423 and a commentary for your consideration

I am slowly coming to the conclusion - after much reading and much research (ongoing) - that the notion of photography as "art" has been hijacked by opposite ends of the photography spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are the hordes of photographers who declare that everything they create is art and that it is all of equal "value". At the other end are a relatively small band of academics/critics - very few photographers among them - who declare that only that photography which conforms to some arcane theory - heavy on the sociology, structural psychology, structural linguistics, semiotics, et al - is art.

The problem with this as I see it is, as Eric Fredine mentioned on the Random Tidbit post, one of practicality. IMO, just as happens in most cases of polarization, the middle of the (in this case, photography) spectrum is getting the shaft.

By "middle" I mean a meaningfully large contingent of "serious" photographers - those with a fundalmental grasp of the history of the medium, those who understand the medium's capability to illustrate and illuminate, to denoted and connote, to capture a "spirit of fact" that helps to reveal often observed but seldom seen truths - whose photography is both underexposed (to the public) and undervalued, literally and figuratively.

IMO, it's time to find the reincarnation of Alfred Stieglitz and the 291 - in this case as a movement that reclaims and helps redefine the idea of photography as art.

Am I nuts?

ku # 422 and a commentary for your consideration

In the essay The Art That Hides Itself - Notes on Photography's Quiet Genius by Gerry Badger, Badger argues the merits of a 'quiet approach' to photography in which the 'photographers voice' - does not impede our approach to the subject. He sees Eugene Atget as the "veritable patron saint of 'quiet' photographer"' and discusses some of the qualities of his work, relating it to ideas of the photograph as a "memory trace" and the "thereness" of his work - something he explains as "a sense of the subject's reality, a heightened sense of its physicality etched sharply into the image."

Much recent gallery photography has relied on the use of large prints - what Badger calls "the muralist syndrome". "Quiet" photography calls for quiet - and thus small-scale works. "Quiet" photographers are obviously concerned about their subject matter whereas some others are more concerned about the concept of the image.

This sentiment seems to echo that of Sally Eauclaire from her book The New Color Photography (out of print but well worth finding [google search]- the hard cover is rare and expensive but the soft cover is easier to find and way less expensive.)

Writing about "...the many photographers who consider visual and/or sentimental excesses as keys to expressivity..." she opines that "...their lust for effect is everywhere apparent. Technical wizardry amplifies rather than recreates on-site observations...they burden it (photographs) with ever coarser effects. Rather than humbly seeks out the "spirit of fact", they assume the role of God's art director making his immannence unequivical and protrusive."
,
Question - Do you consider yourself to be a "quiet" photographer, and, if so, why is it important to be so?

Random tidbit

Is Photography Art? A great soccer manager, who, when asked whether football was a matter of life and death replied. "Nothing as trivial as that!"

FEATURED COMMENT: Eric Fredine wrote, "Well, mostly I was thinking that I don't care much one way or the other what you call me or what I do. Practically, I suppose I do care if one definition might make my work worth more than another ;)."

Michelle C. Parent ~ A man-ly oak

I was at Acadia NP in Maine last weekend (October 14/15). I was immediately drawn to this area across a bridge on a side road. The light was pure magic to me. I wandered around in this small area, taking a few photos, but nothing that pulled at my heart, but as I was leaving I turned back one more time and saw this oak in all his glory. I felt as though I was asked to take this photo. How could I resist?