Quote Originally Posted by pdmoylan View Post
Many Westin compositions are distinctive but not aesthetically appealing. I wouldn’t hang most of them on my walls.
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A distinctive Compositional signature is what many photo devotees are seeking it seems to me.
Agree with that sentiment. All this stuff to me is dated, I get the same feeling when looking at Russian avant garde photographers like Rodchenko. I get an intellectual reaction, like “I see what you did there”, but not an emotional one.
Best way I can explain it is that I don’t connect with the reasons they had to take the photographs?
Weston had excellent reasons to photograph a parade of bell peppers, but am I ever in the mood for looking at pictures of bell peppers?

Obviously if Weston’s peppers and Rodchenko’s weirdly cropped, tilted photographs resonate emotionally with you then you win.

Even AA I struggle with. The idea that B&W is the best medium for landscape just doesn’t sit well with me. B&W is an abstraction, why chase the best possible reproduction with an abstract medium?
I don’t like all of his pictures, but the ones I do like, I still think they’d look better in colour. And looking at his actual colour photos, you can tell he had an understanding of how to work with colour

I think of composition as the drum part in a rock song (and the melody/lyrics would be subject matter, and the guitar lead would be the punctum). Many mediocre songs have a perfectly good drum part ; I don’t listen to those. Some promising songs have a poor drum part ; those are demos, they can’t be considered the finished product. And some good songs have an over the top drum part that is detrimental to the whole. But when a great song also happens to have a unique and striking drum part, that’s when things take off…