Video: All our photos are the same?

[Bernice Loui]

What is Beauty? Is beauty only in the eyes of the beholder? Or, is beauty something much deeper, does beauty require literacy in a specific language?

Do you see beauty in Euler's Equation, if yes then why?



Beauty is all around us to see, notice and can be shared with others. One of the means to share the beauty within the world we all live in and share is by art, be it painting, sculpture, music, math, computer code, schematics, molecular structure, photography or many numerous other means.

Images be they created by photography, digital image, computer generates or ... they are products of the natural world focused thru lens of humanity. Newness, means nouns that has not been previously noticed or presented to other members of humanity. Nothing more nothing less.

And yes, there can be and is beauty in doggie poop or any other poop.

If said photographer believes the reward is in the process, the process then becomes much about self-indulgence and not using the photographic process as a means to an end. Ponder for a moment who is actually involved in the photographic process, often times is the the lone photographer or the the photographer with others that aid in making the photographer's vision into reality.

Now that the photographer's vision has been turned into reality for others to view, interpret, appreciate, or loath. What can be said about the process?

Could newness be really about ideas or about what is familiar to humanity?

What happens to newness once it has become common place in humanities experience?



Bernice

Bernice, your image of "street refuse" immediately brought to mind Irving Penn's series of images of detritus, not only made with a large format camera, but beautifully platinum printed, to give "voice" to what we humans discard. But unfortunately what that series does for me is to take your well articulated comments about art, and respond, "you have just underlined the truth of this thread, all our images are the same." And that type of image also brings to mind Jules Feiffer's play "Little Murders" where one character is a photographer who achieves fame photographing dog droppings. So again, the general concept of the image you posted is in fact already common enough for satire. I have to return to my original premise that for most of us, the reward of photography is the process, rather than the uniqueness of the image. And the fact that someone else has had an idea does not mean that the idea was not new to us when we first expressed it.