Competency vs. Creativity

[Stephen Willard]

Art as grocery.

Exactly, us wall decorators simply sell our wears to put food on the table. What is wrong with that. Pollock did it. Adams did it. Picasso did it. And the list goes on...

[tim atherton]

Exactly, us wall decorators simply sell our wears to put food on the table. What is wrong with that. Pollock did it. Adams did it. Picasso did it. And the list goes on...

"simply sell our wears to put food on the table"

a simple viewpoint but simply wrong - that's not "simply" what Pollock or Picasso did.

anyone who fails to see that would be a simple at best

(btw, I don't think either of them made clothes?)

[Stephen Willard]

People should only speak for themselves without dragging others in their negativity.

Exactly. There are many people who highly respect Adams work such as myself. So when someone comes along and implies his work is marginally competent and hollow (rather negative wouldn't you say) then I decided to remind these high minded individuals that we really are nothing more than wall decorators myself included.

Wall paper, prints, photographs, paintings, stenciling, mirrors, and plastic flowers all compete for real-estate on some patrons wall.

[ageorge]

Fair enough...

But beauty is a pretty tired horse. There must be more to photography than beauty, no? Don't you find beauty intellectually vacant? Is it the only duty of "art" to make me "feel" good?

And yes roteague, I am poking at you to

It all depends what is your concept of beauty.
It should actually be written Beauty.
Beauty has a Univrsal value that encompasses the trends and time, it is the equivalent of timeless Art.

What does intellect have to do with Art?
Intellect is the enemy of Art.
Oscar Wilde said: There are two ways to dislike Art: One is by disliking it, the other is by liking it with the intellect.
The artist duty is to show the world that beauty is everywhere even in the worst of things.
It is a spiritual view of the world that tells us to look beyond the conventional and discover that something that can be experienced only with the heart.

There.

I would hate to think that I must leave my brain at home when visiting an art gallery, museum or just going out in the world with my camera for that matter. There is no incompatibility between art and intellect, quite the contrary, at least in my way of thinking and thankfully I am not alone. The world is not all warm and fuzzy. Why should art only reflect the beauty of the world? There is more to photography than just pretty pictures. I feel art has a larger responsibility than just to make me/us feel good.

I suppose we will have the agree to disagree.

There? Where?

[paulr]

It's a very strange and artificial dichotomy ... to think that if something engages your eyes/heart/soul/whatever that it can't also engage your intellect. or vice versa. most great art works on many levels.

For what its worth, many of the heroes of people in this forum (weston, adams strand, etc.) wanted people to think about their work, and just admire its prettiness. look at the many writings by any of these people ... they discuss a lot more than just esthetics.

[nelsonfotodotcom]

Late to this thread.

As there is simply no accounting for taste, there is no use to be concerned with it. No matter what is produced, a fan - somewhere - can be located for same; no matter how widely popular a thing might be, there will surely exist scores who are opposed to it.

Be curious. Play. Question. Risk. Please thyself.

Those are the rules in my book.

[David_Senesac]

Kirk I immediately positively embraced your premise. The many strong though diverse responses reflect well on the membership of this forum.

Indeed considering your statement, I use my visual sense like a fine tuned bloodhound's nose. Something that through long years of being open to the positive aesthetic within, I have evolved to be able to sense with my right brain skills. I wondered about my own work and suspected very little of my body of marketed landscape images required much creativity beyond the composition process of positioning scene elements because I've been capturing landscapes so long that I've seen and experienced the many ways I can approach subjects. In fact none of several dozen on my gallery index images required much creativity except for an old 35mm image, http://www.davidsenesac.com/images/print_95b_24-20.html. One can read the story on that webpage if amused.

Thus the frequent observation that I can reach subjects and very quickly and efficiently size up very good positions to plunk my tripod down at. That phase completed, the rest of the capture process proceeds rather mechanically. However I expected a few of my Coolpix closeup images might have creativity involved because they more often presented novel visual situations that I then had to explore in new ways using all my skills. Indeed just a few of those closeup images involved at least some small creative leap. Not enough that I would categorize the creativity strongly versus what one might see in other artforms, but nonetheless creatitivity. Thus some examples below of this subtle process when a sense of creativity is involved in even nature and landscapes where one would not expect much. Note I won't be around the next while. ...David

The following is my "Coolpix Closeup Slideshow Page" link http://www.davidsenesac.com/slidesho...lideshows.html. On that page are six slideshows that I have links below to individual images within.

For this image in slideshow 6, I noticed this banana slug on a steep slope and knowing they have a rather comical head, thought I might be able to get my tiny Coolpix 7900 right at ground level in order to capture it head on:
http://www.davidsenesac.com/slidesho..._slug_face.jpg

For this image in slideshow 5, I noticed how surf foam bubbles acted like a magnifying glass. That gave me the idea of capturing a situation where they would magnify tiny pebbles on a stony shore:
http://www.davidsenesac.com/slidesho...es_pebbles.jpg

For this image in slideshow 2, I noticed how fringepod backlit by the sun glowed. Thus decided to find a situtation where I could get extra close in macro to emphasize the tiny holes in the seed pods isolated against a distant enough background for them to stand out strongly: http://www.davidsenesac.com/slidesho...ngepod_sun.jpg

For this image in slideshow 1, I noticed how the disk elements of the central part of this mule ears species flower tended to whorl out novely when opening up from a bud. Thinking the ray flowers might provide an interesting composition of spokes around such whorls, I experimented capturing various closeups until I found what I wanted: http://www.davidsenesac.com/slidesho...e_ears_cen.jpg

[Kirk Gittings]

Some nice work there David. FWIW, I don't consider myself particularly "creative". At least in the sense that I am visually breaking any new ground. I am not that artistically courageous. What satisfies me the most are well executed images of subjects that really matter to me. And when I so rarely accomplish that, it is the most satisfying event of my life and I crave it like a drug.