From: shannon stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 04/11/02-05:14:44 PM Z
>When I was in art school, it was "bad" to photograph nature. Only the
>people photographing the city got the class and teachers excited. If you
>brought in a landscape that didn't have any man-made items in it, the
>reaction was, "Why are you doing this?" Your photograph must have a
>purpose, and a picture of a tree doesn't have a purpose or a concept. The
>answer "Because it is beautiful" was not valid, and I think that's
>ridiculous. The theme "man vs. nature" also got real old.
That happens at our school still. You'd think it would be real old by
now. We landscape photographers get discouraged sometimes. But at
Fotofest there were two really wonderful shows that encouraged me.
One was a show of Russian pictorialism from the early 20th century,
lots of it landscapes of the sort I like to do--the landscape around
farms and small villages, with people in them--and there was a
photogravure show by Geoff Winningham about the bayou that runs
through Houston, a surprisingly wild and wooded place in the middle
of the city.
--shannon
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