I often find that things that I disagree with are more interesting than those with which I am simpatico.
For example, the Conscientious blog of Jörg Colberg had a post, yesterday, When the medium becomes the message with which I agree whole-heartedly. Bits from it:
I don’t care much about the process when looking at photography (unless the process is an integral part of the photography, which is almost never the case). What I mean by that is that whatever it took to produce a photograph does not determine whether the result is good or bad.
… For me, photography is an art form and not a craft (not that there’s anything wrong with crafts – I’m just not as interested in crafts as in art). How a photograph is produced I find not all that interesting (which probably in part explains why I don’t share the wide-spread rejection of digitally created work). At the end of the day, I am interested in the image.
Amen, brother. But, well, duh, anybody who reads this blog knows I’d say that. Where’s the interest in bobbing your head up and down and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, zzzzz…
More interesting, to me, was my reaction to Jörg Colberg’s personal photo-essay called Higher Education. It shows the interior spaces ( halls and classrooms ) and work spaces of some college or university. The pictures are good, but my strongest reaction was an overpowering phantom smell. I dislike urban, hate cities, and have an almost phobic aversion to the atmosphere, the smell, of big public buildings. Hospitals in particular, but schools are a close second. Sitting here at my computer, a mile from the nearest human being and cocooned in my own personal aroma, I nevertheless got the sensation of those alien scents by looking at Colberg’s pictures. I think that means he did a good job … though it’s probably not what he had in mind.
Next, I looked at Colberg’s About Me page. He has a strip of four of those photo-booth self-portraits. The top two are duds. But the lower two work. In those two he shows his hands. A portrait is no good if it doesn’t show the person’s hands.
Last, from his blog page, I followed his link to his Amazon Wish List page. Call me a weirdo, but I found the considerable collection of desired books really interesting … and revealing. Fellow book-worms will understand this.
I don’t read Colberg’s blog regularly ( I found the quoted post via Luminous Lint’s blog feed ) and I’m not specifically interested in Mr. Colberg as a person. I’m just compulsive about finding things out. Lay a track of breadcrumbs and I’ll follow it.
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A recent post on Jim Johnson’s blog, ( Notes On ) Politics, Theory & Photography about the work of photographer Aric Mayer includes this sentence from a quote by Mayer:
By examining aesthetic positions available and deployed in depicting that catastrophe, we can see how the aesthetic positions themselves can at times work in opposition to the content of the work.
To me, that sentence is completely meaningless. ( By who, by what means, to what standard is ” the content of the work” determined exclusive of any aesthetic position ? ) But, as stated at the top of this post, I got more value out of disagreeing with Mr. Mayer than I did from agreeing with Mr. Colberg. ( I frequently read Jim Johnson’s blog because I very often disagree with what he has to say. )
-Julie
