>Memories are created from these images and can be
>processed into graphic form using skills developed with materials such as
>sticks on sand, scratches on cave walls and rocks, paint and inks onto
>various surfaces; these processes have, recently, become quite sophisticated
>and categorized into different areas of human endeavour.
>[....]
> Would anyone care to say whether we could justifiably call this process
>ALT photo? If you can, then you have freed yourself from the divisions which
>separate photographers from painters. Why would Artists wish to sustain these
>barriers, anyway, which have long since disappeared from the world of
>advertising graphics practice?
They used to say (who they was, I'm not sure but I used to hear it) that
there were two kinds of photographers; those who had gone to art school
and those who hadn't. I happened to have gone to art school. The old
fashioned kind, where all you did for the first year was to draw, all the
time.
Then, in my early photo life (mid '60's) on the weekend camping trips we
used to take down the California coast, my friends and I would talk
around the fire about such things as: "If for some reason, we couldn't
make photographs, would you still do it, and what would it be? Would you
make some kind of images and what would you use to make them? What about
this burned stick right here." I will never forget when one of the guys
got up really early and had built a horse out of driftwood before the
rest of us were even awake.
Maybe these concerns have more meaning as questions than as potential
answers. But anyway, I think that these questions point out my longtime
fascination with making my own materials and corroding my images into
metal. Also, from time to time, I go into something of a drawing frenzy.
I once heard one of the painters on the faculty at the University of
Washington go into a long rhapsody about making his own charcoal. I
understood it entirely. Personally, I have never thought of myself as
being across any gap from the painters, any more than one painter from
another. On the other hand, I can't say the same for advertising
graphics. I've done advertising work. A fair amount of it. And I don't
think it is the same at all. It is fundamentally different. Tools and
materials are perhaps the same, but the intent is not.
Larry Bullis
Skagit Valley College