Okay, I'm going to lose my usual cool demeanor and shout here for a second, so please pardon me: I'M NOT PLANNING ON TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANY CORPSES I'M NOT PLANNING ON TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANY CORPSES
Is that plain enough English for everyone here???? Let me refer you to my original post: "The final product is not going to be a series of corpse shots - I'm not envisioning anything that literal." What is so damned difficult to understand about that? Why all the criticism for something I NEVER SAID?
I hope you'll excuse this temper outburst, but the responses here have ranged from the irrelevant to the outright derisive (with a few exceptions), all over some idea of what I'm attempting to do that has nothing to do with what I posted. My desire to watch the undertaking process comes from wanting to observe the process first-hand, to be in the right mental space for this project. What will the photographs be, you ask? I DON'T KNOW. They could take the form of cheesy butterfly shots, self-portraits, street photography- anything. . .who knows. . but they won't be photos of dead people! Is it that hard for all of you to believe that I might have a little more going on upstairs than the hackneyed, shock-effect images you seem to eager to attribute to me? Has none among you ever immersed yourself in different milieu simply to gain a perspective before embarking on a project, photographic, literary or otherwise? It's called research .
Moreover, some of these responses have been pretty much personal attacks, so I'm going to answer in kind: Andy: You insult me. You attribute to me some kind of Mapplethorpe-Madonnaesque desire to shock for no apparent reason. Whatever in the world gives you the idea that I'm that personally and intellectually shallow? You don't even know me, or my project, nor can you apparently read either, because you've made up a whole persona for me and my work that, for the life of me, I can see NO inspiration for in my original post. You must be incredibly jaded to want to see that kind of base motivation in someone's work you've never even seen - someone you don't even know. Believe it or not, Mr. Howell, there are working photographers left in the world who derive inspiration from some place other than propagandistic, shock-style commercialism. Your rant is misdirected - find some uneducated and self important 20 year old to spew your criticism at; I'm sure they'll appreciate your advice on their crass agendas. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but you impugned my character pretty offensively in your response.
To Simon: You are absolutely right; arrogance is not a foot in the door when you want to get close to subjects. I apologize for coming off that way - I didn't mean to say that I should have carte blanche to run roughshod over my subjects in the real world, all in the glorious name of art. What I did mean was that I was hoping that other working artists would understand the sometimes vague and driven ideas that set a project in motion, and wouldn't hold me to some moralistic standard of justification for my work. We all have to fight that kind of stuff when Rudy Giuliani pulls funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. . I was hoping I could reserve the soft-pedal humanistic approach for my foot-in-the-door with my subjects, and get down to brass tacks with fellow photographers. Anyone who sits in front of other working artists and photographers and claims that the sole reason they do their work is out of compassion and philanthropy is either lying, or not a very driven person, aesthetically or intellectually. I'm not going to misrepresent my motivations - they're entirely personal. I'm sorry if that's too candid, but it's true. That does NOT, however, mean that I think I'm the best or most important artist on the face of the earth, that my work is necessarily even that interesting to anyone else, or that people should bow down and scrape before me, begging to have their photograph taken. I may be self-absorbed when it comes to my work, but I'm not a delusional jerk. I guess I just wanted to start some honest dialogue with others on this forum about the artistic process, and what I got was a bunch of flak that seems to reveal more about the posters than it does about me. I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for this (because it's honest and on the mark, I think), but before any of you hit the "submit" button, please take a minute to ask yourself why you're more inclined to malign me and my motives than you are to actually offer me the help I asked for. If I were such a self-important ass, I never would have asked ANYONE for help on this. I offered up the beginnings of my project here in good faith guys. . .
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