something else

click 'er for bigger -
my homage to the Westons - from Weston Beach, Point Lobos State Park April 2007

Going back to one of the early greats, I've recently been through Photographs From Five Decades by Brett Weston. On page after page are phenomenal black and white images. Second son of Edward, Brett was a master at seeing the world for photographs. Remarkably, he was taking pictures of car rust, chipped paint, broken glass, and ice forms as far back as 1935. We're still seeing the world through his eyes, 70 years later. He was doing photographic abstraction during a time when painters were doing the same with paint.  In the included profile R.H. Cravens writes,

An intriguing quality in Brett's work is that the greater the distance his lens encompasses, the less movement there is. The closer the subject, the more intense the rhythmic relationships.

It is the images which "encompass the greater distance" which are the more traditional windows on a beautiful world. On the other hand, the "closer subject" asks to be viewed as it is, for its surface reality, its shallowness. Yet they are the most successful and challenging. But I suspect it's time to find something else to work with.

Cravens quotes Brett,

Hell, it's all been done - rocks, nudes, dunes, kelp. But nature is such a magnificent arranger, and it is - all of it - always changing. You have to have an almost microscopic sense, a discerning, restless eye.

Perhaps so, but there is only so much tolerance for pictures of more rocks, nudes, dunes, and kelp, even if they are done in a "new" way.

Brett also says,

You fall in love with the image right off, but the judgment is a long time coming.

I'm still self editing, perhaps too heavily. What the something else is I'm still searching for.

Comments

[Don]

Yes it has all been done but......

Yesterday the wife and I took one of our rides along the Hudson River where we have been many,many times before and still found some new shots

[KMW]

That's precisely what Brett meant, as far as I can see. You have to be open to seeing something new, as the world changes all the time.

What I'm interested in is learning to see in an entirely new way. Brett and many of his contemporaries have shown us ways to look at the world, and it seems we're still seeing it in those ways. This is what I find so exciting about Art - that people are constantly trying to look at things in a new way. Most of them don't work. But at least they tried.

In the next few days I'll try to write about the recent interview with Joel Meyerowitz in Focus in which he talks about seeing in new ways.