hey guys, here's a serious question that i'll probably overstate because i overs tate everything (including that) but here goes: i have this judgment that there are WAYYY too many people out there taking the same photos over and over and ov er again, convincing themselves that they're "artists" but fundamentally missing the whole point of art. in short, a huge part of America's photographic scene is in a serious rut.
sure, shots of aspens and canyon country at sunrise are pretty, but that is ALL they are, and if this were any other art medium (painting, jazz, literature) the people who think that kind of work is "art" would be laughed right out of the g ame because what they do is so transparently formulaic, un-creative and derivati ve. All they're really doing is showing that they can competently and precisely copy the work of others. Where is the art in that?
Painters learn to copy the work of others as an exercise in technique, but in mu ch of photography, copying the work of others seems to be the final goal. It's absurd! Imagine if there were thousands of writers out there who aspired to wri te books that read exactly like Kurt Vonnegut's novels, or thousands of jazz mus icians whose sole goal was to sound exactly like Paul Desmond, or thousands of p ainters whose work looked EXACTLY like Andrew Wyeth's, so you couldn't even tell whose was what. it's hard to imagine such a scenario in the other art forms, a nd yet, i believe that's exactly what's going on in photography. You could borr ow ten photos from each of a thousand nature photographers, and mix them all up, and you'd have NO IDEA which photographer took which picture because they're al l exactly the same.
what will it take to get the photography community THINKING, working on new, dif ficult, challenging projects that involve introspection and sophistication, risk , experimentation and failure? there's a wild-ass beautiful universe out there, right in our own cities and backyards, and yet most photographers think they ha ve to go to these few "special" pristine natural places at just the right time t o take an artistic photograph. it's the saddest and most ironic thing to see th e same old crap year after year being called "art"-- the same hackneyed photos t aken at sunrise from the same worn-in tripod holes from the same places in the s ame national parks, all without an ounce of any of the ingredients that artists from other media would say are the foundations of meaningful art.
where is the satisfaction in doing that kind of work? why is the photographic c ommunity so stuck in this furrow? i think the current situation is worse than t he pictorialist movement at the turn of last century, which in retrospect we all look at with a smirk because everyone was doing the same tacky-looking work and no one realized how bad it all was. a hundred years later, here we are repeati ng history, just with better technology.
please respond sincerely with whatever thoughts you have to offer, so long as th ey're well-considered (one-liners from the shooting gallery will not help anyone ).
~chris jordan (Seattle)
www.chrisjordanphoto.com
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