I have a grudge against photographers carrying on about their "art" and how much time it takes, what long hours they put in and so on. Oh, please. I'm a sculptor. It usually takes me more than a year to make a sculpture: do the drawing, make the armature, create the sculpture, cast or fire it, mount and patinate it, and then finally, take photographs of it. The very final step, the photograph, is just a minute fraction of the effort of what it takes to make a sculpture, that entire year of work. And that's the same amount of work a photographer does - just that last bit - the minute, tiny bit of effort, the taking of the picture. I do respect the work of nature photographers who travel and camp out in adverse conditions to get those amazing photographs of charging elephants. I feel like they're doing something sort of comparable to what I'm doing in terms of commitment and time. But the snapshots? The sailboats and seagulls and roses and so on? No. That's eye candy and a two year old with a disposable camera could take the same picture.
In the '60's, I spent a couple of years concentrating on photography. I took my camera wherever I went, shot a bazillion photographs and I have the stack of Triex contact sheets to prove it. Ultimately, I got bored with photography. It felt like a dead end for me. I realized what I really wanted to do was to learn how to draw, paint, and sculpt, and that's what I did. So here's what I think about photography. With a few exceptions (Steichen, Adams, Weston, Lange) photographs are just eye candy. Pleasant, eye-catching, basically unsatisfying and probably not good for you. If you're actually visually hungry, there's nothing in a photograph to nourish or satisfy you. I can't look at a print of a photograph for even a few solid minutes, whereas I can look at a Rembrandt for years. In a Rembrandt, there are variations and gradations of tone, textures, colors, line, shapes, forms, lights and darks. In a photo, there's none of that. Photography has no substance for me. There's basically nothing to look at. I view photos the same way at dog looks at a mirror, interested at first and then "oh, that's not even real" and then annoyed. For me, there can be no comparison between a painting and a photograph - one is interesting and the other is inherently empty.
Every day, we all see hundreds of photos and videos. They're everywhere. Everybody takes photographs - with phones and iPads as well as with cameras. Our lives have turned into one big Kodak moment. Inevitably, there's a sameness about all these photos. How many pictures have you seen of fall foliage reflected in water? sailboats on a sunny day? flowers with butterflies? old barns? Almost all of these photos look the same. In writing, if the same idea is expressed in exactly the same way in the same language over and over again, it becomes trite. That's what all these photos are: trite images. They are trivializations reducing what was an authentic experience into something shallow and meaningless. Instead of enhancing our lives with real content, depth and meaning, they are dulling our senses with mind-numbing repetition.
Because a photograph can be assimilated in a fraction of a second, photography is a perfect fit with 21st century culture. Anything that takes significant time and actual thought to create or appreciate is totally out of fashion, but photos are ubiquitous, the cultural version of fast food. I call it "Easy Art" or "Art Lite" - fast and easy to create, fast and easy to assimilate. Photos are ephemeral and temporary. Since we see so many of them, they are as disposable and unmemorable as kleenex. I think photos almost never make it into permanent storage part of our brains; they're like all the everyday trivia that is discarded immediately. I don't think this is good for us. We're bombarded with a constant visual overload of drivel that amounts to visual pollution, in which we see hundreds of images every day, but really look at none of them. Our brains are overstimulated and undernourished; our perceptions are warped by an avalanche of cultural garbage, a diet of candy.
I'm off to the library. I'm not taking my camera.
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