From: Jack Brubaker (jack@jackbrubaker.com)
Date: 01/08/03-11:14:13 AM Z
This is sort of an asside to the issue of "outsider"
One of the features common to the several introductory level photo classes I
have been near over the years is that there was in each one or two students
who were involved in a very personal self-examination that boardered on
painfull and functioned as an undirected therapy for them. Photography was a
non-verbal way of expressing their fears, concerns, questions, what-ever
that didn't require them to learn to draw, mix paint, ar any of the other
time consuming skills associated with "fine art". As such it was an
accessable form of self expression that they used for a while and then went
away. Their instructors were hestitant to confront them with the content of
their imagry since most showed resistance to acklnowledging or missinturpted
the sometimes blatent imagry of their work. This is not "outsider" or
"folk" as such but is an area of photography that comes close. It is worth
remembering for most people photography is not technical or difficult. They
beleave the Kodak ideal. So the image of the self taught, or un-taught,
artist or outsider may well exist within photography and photography may in
fact be a magnet to those having an eposodic need to express themselves.
Just think of all the home computers full of low res. digital images out
there. They aren't all pictures of the grandkids.
Jack Brubaker
> From: Judy Seigel <jseigel@panix.com>
> Reply-To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
> Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 18:13:15 -0500 (EST)
> To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
> Subject: Re: outsider art
>
> Disfarmer cannot be an "outsider" photographer because he was working,
> however brilliantly, in a given tradition: portrait studio.
>
> Nor does "common folk" define outsider art, because most common folk,
> Sunday painters, are doing conventional modes -- however amateurishly.
>
> j.
>
> On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Shannon Stoney wrote:
>
>> Can photographers be Outsider ARtists or folk artists? It would seem
>> strange to single out self-taught photographers since almost all
>> photographers are self-taught. It seems to me that photography may be the
>> Mother of All Folk Arts, since it is the one practised the most by the
>> common folk.
>>
>> --shannon
>>
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