January 5, 2020

Photography Blog

At the height of photography as an established visual art form, the photographers had insight into new subjects and unique compositions, the ability to stay their course of vision by making images of the ordinary and making them a revelation of the extraordinary. 

The street photographers were the first to understand that images of the real America, the good, the bad and the ugly were what was needed to make a statement about our society and the inherent racism and exploitation of the poor that has exited for centuries and still does!

These images inspired the young photographers to push through their fears of making photographs of the common place and just be themselves and use their visionary intuition. 

Photography is more than just documenting your life, it is a way to express your life through your image creations. You have a chance to give the world a glimpse of your inner self, your inner world through creating images of purpose and sincerity.

Now, in this twenty-first century there is no originality in image creation but redundant visual content that doesn’t give us any clues into the creators unique perspective. They are more interested in taking pics of themselves than exploring their own inner vision becoming externalized. 

The viewer of images today need more and more explosive controversial imagery of sex and violence to get their visual motor running. And of course how can we pass up images of stupidity. But these images are mostly surface images without depth, feeling or purpose except to make fun of someone else’s half-baked performance.

More times than not the current viewers of photographs are easily bored looking at the same lighting, the same expressions, same street scenes, the sameness of composition, and they ask themselves where have all the unique vibrant images with insight and character gone to. They are still present but they get lost amongst the surface glitter of color enhanced nature, landscape images, people images, nighttime images, really the majority of image created today for publication are redundant copies of subjects made from the masters years ago! 

What we have here isn’t real image creation but image redundancy, and image manipulation! By making the digital cameras basically take pictures for the person we have undermined the quality of image creation and the necessary focus needed to see beyond the shallow surface, and made photography a commodity just like buying baked beans. Except in photography most people give their images away for free without thinking twice to social media. 

Now I don’t want the reader to think that image manipulation is a bad thing for if the artist sees in the image something more powerful by using color enhancement or a textured surface to bring out his inner vision than so be it. It is the photographers job to express his inner intuition anyway possible to get the external world to take a deeper look at his image creations.

Images of the external world are reflections of your reality, a reality in constant flux. To capture these moments you must have a heighten sense of the behavioral flow moving around you. Look through your own eyes for originality and an expressive image that reflects your inner person. And not a snap shot taken while being distracted by life and the swift flow of time. When you are in your moments time seizes to exist and you are in immediate contact with your subject and the composition and light that will reveal it to you. And after you are done making images and you look at the time you can’t believe the hours that went by and they felt like seconds! 

Our lives have been broken apart in the addiction to follow instead of lead. 

A good photographer looks at the world not as a place to ignore with the pressing duties of work and the loss of time. Photographers when they are in the moment of visualizing their subject through contemplative awareness time is nowhere present, time vanishes and the photographer is in a new dimension of perceptive reality through an internal vision.

We don’t have to look far back into the past to find the culprit of the beginning and end to photography as an art form.

We just have to see the evolution of content beginning to degrade as more and more people took up the digital camera, phone cameras and overwhelmed their senses with trivia and bad compositions! 

Lighting a scene was too much work. Composing a scene with originality was to frustrating and time consuming. Digging deeper into the landscape or cityscape became just too boring for the snap shooters, this new generation of shooters demand instant gratification from anything they do! 

Everything should come easily to me for I am a known entity on social media and anything I touch or shoot becomes an important item to be displayed for my high brow followers to ooh and awe over.

And what did the art world get from the ease of taking pics in the mid twentieth century, they got a slap across the face and a loss of revenue as photography became a cliche a way to copy and not originate your own uniqueness.

If you over think your visual purpose with lighting, lenses to use, filters, and special effects then you have too much equipment holding you back to just be present and take in the beauty of mother nature as it is and not try to force upon the landscape your ego or your intellect.

Ego will get you pushing the lines of vanity and your intellect will get you in a mechanical response to the beauty before you. Both will undermine any chance of creating a worth while image.

By seeing only meter readings, f/stops, shutter speeds you have lost your connection with the scene present before you. 

By moving quickly to set up your equipment you have lost the composition that was slowly revealing itself to you. 

Yes, you will have to determine these important elements when you have found your intuitive composition but for now just enjoy the show before you. Be grateful that you are present in such beauty. 

Sometimes when you come upon a scene and the light is breaking through with a magnificent sunset you must step forward and quickly set up and make your photographs. But you are not overthinking natures gift, you are instinctively reacting to an external beauty and taken advantage of your timing by reaching your destination at the peak of morning/evening light! 

We each have our own way of seeing the world. This can be good or bad. But as a photographer it is your responsibility to show your inner truth through imagery that reflects the integrity of your visual realism.

Our external presence seen objectively by others as just another camera buff clicking away at some god forsaken subject no one else could possible be interested in is the very definition of conditioned responses. 

Those people only see a limiting value in crossing the street to the other side. The crowd keeps its eyes forward never looking around at the beauty and uniqueness of details that they are missing. 

Our lives have been suspended, broken apart in our seemingly addictive natures to follow instead of lead.

We are under powerful forces of greed and criminality which instills in us a lessened truth, a forgetting of oneself as his own truth in the hectic pace of life just to make a living as the prices rise and we the people are undermined by exploitive corporate criminals.

In making photographs listen to your instinct, your intuition. Sometimes all that is necessary is patience to be present in your awareness of the scene that surrounds you. And by being ready as the light changes, you had an inkling that something was happening behind you and not in the scene present before you. And as you looked around behind you, you saw the beautiful sunlight warming the multicolored flowers in a landscape you placed yourself in with anticipation.

As a photographer you never know for sure where your instincts of nature’s light will take you but you must be ready to find a space that gives you an opportunity to change directions in a moments notice.

A good photograph expresses the personality of the photographer.

We are at a crossroads with how to reclaim photography as an art form. Photography has become a commodity, a comedy act with no other purpose than entertainment. Photography used to reveal the beauty of this world and the ugliness in this world. Photographers gave their lives to photograph the wars and the corruption that now exists in corporate America. Where are the photographers covering these explosive issues? They are present doing their best but corporate media doesn’t show these images of truth for then the sleepwalking people might awaken to the oligarchs that have now taken over this globe.

It does take awhile to get what photography is all about. It is not about the image but what the image say’s about the photographer that took that photograph. It is his inner subjective nature we see in the great images that are created with a purpose.

The images taken in today’s society are snap shots of life without depth of character. The people of the world are changing and ignoring the underlying condition of our democracies. Snap shots are frivolous moments that keep one sedated without having to use your mind to see the truth of media’s dominance of our consciousness not to empathize with others and to always seek the truth of words spoken by political criminals. We seek fluff over substance. Fluff with no depth for we don’t want to know the truthful ending of this ride we are on. We see but don’t react. We feel but we don’t express our feelings. We assume a point of view (our safety zone in the herd) and laugh at the truth hidden under the graves of the innocent.

The images snapped now are meaningless, a crossword puzzle without the ability to create an image that is visually significant.

The images taken today are boring, fruitless expressions of surface conformity without a visual identity, a real significant purpose.

Our visual senses have been dulled to ignore any photographer that tries to disrupt our pleasant valley sunday drive of shallowness.

Think about the billions of images taken daily that have no purpose, have no story to tell! These images have no expression of depth in the scene or a deep conscious expression of a person’s life.

We have become objects ourselves, objectified through the camera lens to be a stick figure, an external facade with no depth, a laughing face with closed eyes. There is no longer a meaning in image creation, what we have now is a creation of distractions from the truth we are living. We are slowly being corralled into a tight uncomfortable overcrowded coral that will eventually be demanded to give allegiance to a class of wealth that will rule over all of us with military discipline.

Our lives are now uploaded onto social media sites. But in truth these pics are not our lives it is our ego’s demanding attention as this world hurdles further and further away from our own inner revelations and values. We are becoming silent to our purpose as the power of wealth determines this planets future and ours.

Lets all pose for the camera.  Lets show our addiction to happiness when a camera is presented for a group snap shot. Our fixation on self propaganda where a pose is more important than a subjective truth.