From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 12/22/02-04:17:55 AM Z
Shannon Stoney wrote:
> Of course just trees and rocks by themselves without
> > a gas station or garbage pail, or trailer park or wrecked auto parts are
> > same old same old. Sure, trees are pretty, but IMO all the good trees have
> > been taken -- so what else is new?
>
> I'm having a sense of deja vu all over again.
>
The idea that only trailer parks, junkyards, garbage pails, nuclear
power plants and the like are elements of the "landscape" worth
photographing, and that only the inclusion of some such ironic
contradiction can raise a landscape photograph to the level of art, is
in itself getting to be very same old same old; the contradiction has
been done to death til it's frankly not very interesting any more. My
ideas on this and related questions are presented at more length in an
article I've written on the new pictorial landscape photograph; in the
event that it may be published this year, which I've been led to believe
is a distinct possibility, I probably shouldn't repeat what I said
there, so I'll just say for now that the times they are a changing, and
that whole conventional wisdom cited above belongs to 25 years ago, in
my opinion.
Katharine Thayer
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