From: Christopher Lovenguth (chrisml@pacbell.net)
Date: 04/10/02-10:16:14 AM Z
Totally agree with Carl here...
So do you think that Kiki, Man Ray, Pascin and Duchamp sat around the cafes
of Paris talking about these ideas of what type or procedure of art is more
legitimate? Or were they discussing concepts, composition, personal and
social influence, etc?
-----Original Message-----
From: Carl Weese [mailto:cweese@earthlink.net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 4:03 AM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Re: Jed Perl
jeffbuck@swcp.com wrote:
>>> You fail to explain why drawing from a flower is better than drawing
from a
picture of a flower. You simply assume that there is a rule someplace
that
this is the better procedure.
Better isn't the point. Drawing from a flower is a different experience
from drawing after a photograph of one. Either approach can lead to
subjectively good or bad results. Drawing from a photograph that you
have made specifically for that purpose is a different experience from
appropriating a found photograph made by someone else. Again neither is
absolutely better or worse.
It's also interesting to note that not only were painters using optical
aides long before the invention of Photography, but painters of the
various historic traditions and schools always painted not so much "from
Life" as "from Tradition." As Gombrich has detailed at interesting
length, all the observation in the world will not cause you to draw with
the conventions we call realism unless you've studied and learned to
apply those conventions (some people are much quicker studies than
others, of course).
Photographers adapt some of these conventions too, most notably in the
rules of "correct" perspective for architectural, and other, subjects.
Our eyes see both vertical and horizontal convergence, but the rules of
Renaissance perspective forbid vertical convergence so we eliminate it
by use of view camera controls. The resulting picture isn't more
correct, it's more conventional. Forcing a print to display "all the
tones from black to white" no matter what the subject looked like in the
first place is another totally artificial convention photographers often
succumb to. In fact I think avoidance of this convention leads many
people to experiment with the alternate processes (there, back on topic
at last).
---Carl
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