something else about something else

The August 2008 issue of Focus Magazine has several worthwhile articles. This is the first issue I've seen. It's pretty slick looking, maybe too much so for my tastes. But the quality of printing is certainly extraordinary, and the interview with Joel Meyerowitz is an intriguing one.

Here's the piece that really caught my attention:

The question for me is, can I move away from the Pictorialist, Renaissance perspective point of view that photography does as a given, and instead make something that is a different kind of space closer to the two dimensional space inside photography...The phenomena require an immersion into the experience, rather than a picture of it from far away...

But can you do it with a photograph in a gallery, a museum setting that allows you to offer the viewer an experience of the phenomena like the original, without making a picture of it that conforms to tried and true methods of perspective and illusion.

Meyerowitz's search for a photograph inside the experience has led him to photograph the elements, prints of which have been displayed in Cologne, New York, and Tokyo. In a sense, much of the history of photography is about trying to recreate the photographer's experience for the viewer. Some from farther away than others, but much of photography has been documentation about what it was like to be there. Something that tries to transcend the "tried and true methods of perspective and illusion" is bound to be something to see. Anyone out there who's seen the prints got a comment about his success with getting the viewer inside the experience?