Even this conversation has been done before.
"There's nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9. circa 200 BC
Even this conversation has been done before.
"There's nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9. circa 200 BC
-Adam
What's truly amazing about this thread...
--- How it keeps going around in circles !
I know just enough to be dangerous !
Spirals, we are never in the same space and time.
Originally Posted by DennisD
Tin Can
All threads go in circles because no one reads all the previous posts :}
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
I have, Kirk.
In particular, #4 and #21, several times.
Cheers,
Merg
I guess it's possible to do something completely new with photography. Some people try too hard to pull it off.
there are only so many ways to make / use a stencil.
The initial question was not whether you'd HAVE to work in a new, never seen before, way. Many people here have chimed in to say that you don't. The question was if you CAN work in a new, never before seen, way. If you wanted to (for whatever reason), would you have a chance? Or has it all been done before?
Speaking for myself, I'm not much of an inventor, but more of an observer, a chronologist. I am comfortable within the boundaries of traditional photography, because I have not reached them yet in my work. Maybe I want to cross them when I get there. But I would have a hard time coming up with something completely new.
What could be the next new thing? Photography today is highly diversified, ranging from over-produced and photoshopped "perfect" photos to avant-garde art that looks like the first couple of exposures on a new roll of 35mm film, unconsciously snapped away to advance the film to frame 1. Hard to imagine that either road can be taken much further. Cell phones are doing for photography what the Kodak did 120 years ago. The results are nothing that hasn't been done before, though. Judging from the role YouTube and teenage YouTube "stars" play for my 12 y.o. son (compared to traditional television), cell phones and social media will define the look of photography for the next generation. Maybe it can offer more truly new things than millions of selfies and food porn.
We all have in our lives a multitude of subjects that we alone can photograph, enough to keep us busy forever. Yet it is good to seek those special subjects that attract countless others. It may be in hopes of doing better than anyone before, or just to have a record of our being there. Even Ansel Adams may well have been aware of Timothy O'Sullivan's magnificent rendition of the Canyon de Chelly when he made two photographs from a similar position. Alas, O'Sullivan did it better.
Of course he was aware of O'Sullivan's work, and even praised it. What Sullivan did so wonderfully is work with dark shapes defined by those old blue-sensitive plates, as opposed to Adams bringing out details in the sky with pan films and colored filters. Different tools. For the same reason, my favorite shot of the El Capitan monolith in Yosemite was the one done by Muybridge using blue sensitive plates which accentuated the sheer mass of the thing. There's a print of it in the Oakland Museum. I often borrow from both worlds. We've all obviously inherited the newer era of mainly panchromatic films; but these can be bent to accentuate
the effect of atmosphere, scale, distance and graphic form, just as haze can be cut through using minus-blue filters like orange and red, or anything in between.
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