From: Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net)
Date: 09/03/02-05:43:59 PM Z
Steve,
Your comments on "learning" landscape photography, reading the books,
getting the filters, reminds me of a conversation I had some years ago when
the Mac was changing graphic designer's lives forever. A designer kept
saying to me "the computer is ok as long as you don't limit yourself to what
it can do, that would be death as a designer". It took me a while, but I
figured out that she'd taken courses to learn Illustrator and Quark, working
like a racehorse with blinders on. She literally thought that what the
"computer"--the page layout program--could do was "limited" to the specific
things she'd been taught. That is to say, she didn't recognise the program
as a large composite tool composed of myriad sub-tools, ready for her to use
to accomplish any creative goal she could imagine (just stay within press
perameters). It was as though a cabinet maker didn't realize that once he'd
learn to make a dovetail joint, he could then use that and the other joinery
he'd learned in any cabinet design he might dream up. Or a photographer
thinking a landscape has to look like something AA might have done. This
person had been a really successful designer in the paste-scissors-copier
era. I hope she eventually got the grok and learned to use the computer
software as a tool.
I don't think "landscape" has a useful working definition. Doesn't need one
either. I make a lot of pictures that many people look at and say
"landscape". I'm usually thinking about something a little more complex,
like the way certain architectural structures are set into the land and what
that says about human interface with the environment, or the way the land
has been sculpted by human interaction (there is, practically speaking, no
wilderness anywhere, that's a Romantic conceit). Defining categories is no
where near as useful or rewarding as looking at individual works well enough
to see them.---Carl
--
web site with picture galleries
and workshop information at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~cweese/
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