A Problem Forever

[ric_kb]

the following paragraphs are from one published piece. [...] marks places I've cut for reasons of distillation & fair use restriction ... //richard.laughlin
it strikes me that several threads adjacent to this one are making these points, or raising these questions, again, after all these decades.
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We no longer have any time, least of all for conscious seeing. We don't mind being presented with verbal and pictorial slogans, mentally and visually predigested: we are used to it. Ready-made products are delivered to our doors, and we are correspondingly lazy. A laziness that is a defense against the oppressive, irritating, all-too-much-ness.
...
An amazing thought: there are people who produce things that are completely without purpose, people who stand off to one side of life, artists for example. How do they find the time, the concentration, the courage? It's another world. Enviable? Perhaps.
But where are the bridges? Bridges between them and a post office clerk, a church councilor, a stenographer? There must be a connection somewhere, a point of contact. And somehow, there must also be something that justifies the existence of these outsiders. What do they play their games for?

For this: so that someone will hold still for a brief moment; will see; will say: yes -- that's how it is -- strange -- beautiful --.

He had seen it sometime or other, and not for the first time. Remnants of images close a circle. A small light flares. Gone.

...
The normal eye sees nothing, does not try to establish new relationships, make new acquaintances. No time, no need. But there are people running around with hungry eyes, including camera people.
...
That is photography: to have a camera in mind, to think photographically. At first glance, photography appears to be a method of more or less mechanical reproduction. But first of all, there is nothing "objective" about a camera lens, it is as subjective as the physiological process of seeing requires.
...
The paths are slowly becoming clearer.
Synthesis: photomontage, superimposition of several photographs, objectless photography.
Analysis: Penetrating the overlooked objects and events right next to us, virgin territory all around. Utterly simple things are suddenly very considerably there, have a self, live their own lives. What about us? We're there, too, and that's all.

------ seeing , 1929, Hans Windisch.
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yep, that long ago.
yep, that same guy.

[Jay DeFehr]

Mr. Windisch was more eloquent than I imagined he might be, never having read him. Still, I don't share his romantic vision of the artist as outsider, whose purpose it is to shake the rest of us from our mental doldrums. My own view is that we make photographs, and create works of art for the same reasons we comb our hair, mow our lawns, whistle a tune, or file our taxes; we're compelled to. What compels us is another question.

[Heroique]

Yes, Mr. Windisch may be eloquent, and he sounds passionate too, but his 1929 comments are unoriginal, clichéd, sentimental, culture-bound. I’m not familiar with his art work, but I suspect he’s a better artist than writer about culture – like most other artists, great and small.

For example, his idea that artists “stand off to one side of life,” apparently “playing games,” but really “searching for connections,” etc., could be straight out of a handbook of clichés titled, “Attributes of the Romanticist or Modernist Artist,” and they seem quite innocent of any sense of cultural history – to be sure, they’d produce a giant “?” above the head of, say, Bernini, who couldn’t have been a more devoted apostle of “the establishment.”

Better, Windisch’s question, “How do [artists] find the time, the concentration, the courage?” is enough to make the most eloquent of Hallmark card writers gnash their teeth in envy. (At least we can thank Mr. Windisch for not writing in incomprehensible jargon!)

[ric_kb]

aside:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftobe...ayer_embedded#!

[Antonenko]

The photographer cannot be the photographer all time. The photographer, the artist, the sculptor and other creative people the same people. I same as well as my wife nearby, feeding my child. They the same people. Photographers as do gymnastics in the mornings as drink beer, grow up cucumbers on a summer residence and meet women. The Person cannot devote itself to the same hobby even if for it it is meaning of the life.