Is it art?
My wonderful wife and I talked a while about this comment from a guest and my response and she convinced me that the first paragraph of my comment was mainly a buffer to save myself from calling my picture art and to save myself from criticism. If I think art is that which engages the viewer, and I think the pictures that I put on the website engage me, then I obviously think they are art, which begs the question, why does that picture engage me.
I had planned to take that picture for about three weeks, but didn't have the opportunity to set it up until that moment. After having taken it, it took me three more days of poring through my images and cropping here and there to settle on something I was finally satisfied with. Why? I wanted to capture that moment because I thought that the explosion of birds off of the ground captured a balance between chaotic and controlled motion and I wanted to freeze that moment. I chose that particular shot because when I look at it, it makes me think of birds flying in the sky against the horizon, but I've replaced the sky with concrete and the clouds with shadows on the concrete. I did this because I see city birds like this as having turned the city into their version of expansive hills and skies, and I feel that most when they explode off of the ground. So I captured it. And it still falls under the theme that I find myself exploring most, finding beauty in unexpected places, trying to communicate that unexpected grandeur of what seems unspectacular when surrounded by everything else yet transforms when all the distractions are thrown away and the frame is set.
A side note: I am going to sound (hell, be) pretentious when I talk about art, and I have to get over worrying about that. Art is one of the few places in life where one is expected to be pretentious. Especially if one looks at the actual definition of the word. Pretentious: "making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction." The undeserved portion of that is what perhaps separates good art from bad art, but all art claims to be important or distinctive, and in explaining why it is one is being pretentious. For those who can't stand the pretention, just look at the pictures.
I had planned to take that picture for about three weeks, but didn't have the opportunity to set it up until that moment. After having taken it, it took me three more days of poring through my images and cropping here and there to settle on something I was finally satisfied with. Why? I wanted to capture that moment because I thought that the explosion of birds off of the ground captured a balance between chaotic and controlled motion and I wanted to freeze that moment. I chose that particular shot because when I look at it, it makes me think of birds flying in the sky against the horizon, but I've replaced the sky with concrete and the clouds with shadows on the concrete. I did this because I see city birds like this as having turned the city into their version of expansive hills and skies, and I feel that most when they explode off of the ground. So I captured it. And it still falls under the theme that I find myself exploring most, finding beauty in unexpected places, trying to communicate that unexpected grandeur of what seems unspectacular when surrounded by everything else yet transforms when all the distractions are thrown away and the frame is set.
A side note: I am going to sound (hell, be) pretentious when I talk about art, and I have to get over worrying about that. Art is one of the few places in life where one is expected to be pretentious. Especially if one looks at the actual definition of the word. Pretentious: "making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction." The undeserved portion of that is what perhaps separates good art from bad art, but all art claims to be important or distinctive, and in explaining why it is one is being pretentious. For those who can't stand the pretention, just look at the pictures.
posted by Solomon | 7:29 AM
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