The Enigma of a Winter Afternoon
“Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.” * Giorgio de Chirico – Artist.
I love this quote, and you’ll now see why I borrowed part of this title from the self-designated Metaphysical Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Even the most mundane of scenes may well have something of a revelation in it for the sensitive soul. Surely that’s what makes YOU choose YOUR favourite subjects: nature, landscape, wildlife, city streets, rural life. It’s a genre you connect with PERSONALLY. It resonates with YOU. This is what makes us want to pick up a camera. Take the photos YOU want (not what you think others will like or might get Explored) and you’ll find the kind of people who really will connect with you.
Is there a story in this photograph of a darkening alley, a light in the window, no other person around except the observer (photographer)? Does the colour create a mood? Is it melancholic? It’s why some people look at a picture and will see nothing special, and others stand back and have an A-Ha moment. Of course the viewer needs to take more than two seconds to really look – not common on social media these days.
The quintessential Twentieth century American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), realist and promoter of “straight photography”, may not have been as mystically inclined as de Chirico, but he also believed he was an artist with something to say. What sets the artist apart in photography (or any art, including literature - because writers must be great observers too) was for Evans “the hungry eye”:
“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Evans may not have been the intellectual artist that di Chirico was, but he believed in photography’s power in a way not unlike this other quote from de Chirico:
“Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.”
Indeed. The fundamental reason why human beings create art (although Bower birds also create artful nests) is to discover meaning. But like life itself, the creation of art is a process, a journey and a pilgrimage. The danger in photography is to miss the forest for the trees. We are often such inveterate collectors of “things” (animate and inanimate) in our photos that we fail to see the connections BETWEEN our images.
One of the tasks I have been consciously working on in my Flickr page is to create real links between my images as a curator might in a museum. It takes me as much time to choose when and where to post a photo on my page as it does to process them. Nothing is random and certainly not chronological. Why? Because those links will very often reveal why it is we do the kind of photography we do. What we are trying to say, who it is we might be trying to communicate with through our pictures. Why bother? Well it’s every individual’s choice, but as Walker Evans rightly said, “(We) are not here long”.
“Only connect,” E.M Forster said in his novel “Howard’s End”. In that is the secret and mystery of this life and the reason why we all do photography and art (whether acknowledged or not). De Chirico and Walker Evans would have agreed on that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm
The Enigma of a Winter Afternoon
“Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.” * Giorgio de Chirico – Artist.
I love this quote, and you’ll now see why I borrowed part of this title from the self-designated Metaphysical Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Even the most mundane of scenes may well have something of a revelation in it for the sensitive soul. Surely that’s what makes YOU choose YOUR favourite subjects: nature, landscape, wildlife, city streets, rural life. It’s a genre you connect with PERSONALLY. It resonates with YOU. This is what makes us want to pick up a camera. Take the photos YOU want (not what you think others will like or might get Explored) and you’ll find the kind of people who really will connect with you.
Is there a story in this photograph of a darkening alley, a light in the window, no other person around except the observer (photographer)? Does the colour create a mood? Is it melancholic? It’s why some people look at a picture and will see nothing special, and others stand back and have an A-Ha moment. Of course the viewer needs to take more than two seconds to really look – not common on social media these days.
The quintessential Twentieth century American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), realist and promoter of “straight photography”, may not have been as mystically inclined as de Chirico, but he also believed he was an artist with something to say. What sets the artist apart in photography (or any art, including literature - because writers must be great observers too) was for Evans “the hungry eye”:
“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Evans may not have been the intellectual artist that di Chirico was, but he believed in photography’s power in a way not unlike this other quote from de Chirico:
“Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.”
Indeed. The fundamental reason why human beings create art (although Bower birds also create artful nests) is to discover meaning. But like life itself, the creation of art is a process, a journey and a pilgrimage. The danger in photography is to miss the forest for the trees. We are often such inveterate collectors of “things” (animate and inanimate) in our photos that we fail to see the connections BETWEEN our images.
One of the tasks I have been consciously working on in my Flickr page is to create real links between my images as a curator might in a museum. It takes me as much time to choose when and where to post a photo on my page as it does to process them. Nothing is random and certainly not chronological. Why? Because those links will very often reveal why it is we do the kind of photography we do. What we are trying to say, who it is we might be trying to communicate with through our pictures. Why bother? Well it’s every individual’s choice, but as Walker Evans rightly said, “(We) are not here long”.
“Only connect,” E.M Forster said in his novel “Howard’s End”. In that is the secret and mystery of this life and the reason why we all do photography and art (whether acknowledged or not). De Chirico and Walker Evans would have agreed on that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm