As long as you let your humanity to drench your photographs, everything is acceptable.
Comments of others are after all, their own personal view of the world and they give you
insight in their mind not your work, unless they are exceptional...
Anyway, most people comment to help themselves not the artist.
(including this comment)
__________________
aristotelis grammatikakis www.arigram.gr black & white film is sexy
I don't like this photo. In Black and white it makes the valley look bleak and uninviting. Seen from the Rhigos Mountain road the views of this valley can be quite stunning.
Social comment isn't all about pretty pictures. Further down the same valley the youths who stole and burnt out the car stabbed a black male student at the small local University just because he was different, a month before I made the image.
This brings into question the motives for making images, do you take "Picture Postcard" type images that sell or make social comments that don't. I prefer to speak my mind through my images.
Ian
To be brutally frank, I don't like the picture either - because I really can't tell what it is trying to say. It seems to have been photographed on b+w IR film, I suspect for no better reason than that you had no other film with you. This of course has distorted the tones of what I presume is actually rough grass, but without any apparent purpose, except that about half the area of the print is filled with a gray mush. If the idea of the picture was "Harsh reality raises its ugly head, even in what might be considered an idyllic setting", you simply haven't got this on the film, in terms of either tonality or composition. Sorry, but there it is.
To be frank David your views are meaningless and in fact quite worthless :-) You have an obsession with IR film, something I haven't used since 1979. . . . . .
You need another coarse of corporal punishment, where's Nurse Hicks, he'll don his stockings and suspenders to admonish you.
A 10"x8" negative/image really doesn't work well at 600 pixels wide . . . ..
I'm not sure that I'd pay too much attention to the negative comment as the poster has obviously misunderstood what you were trying to achieve.
I am curious though about the need to start a thread musing about a negative comment - seems a bit thin-skinned to me. If you're going to post a picture and invite comments then surely you have to take the rough with the smooth? (even if the rough is ill-informed...!).
And anyways, you have to face the fact that not everyone will agree with you. I can certainly see beyond 'picture-postcard' images, but I'm not sure that as a single image this picture is entirely successful as social comment either. Perhaps it would in the context of a wider group of pictures?
Interesting, just proves you don't know but a small part of what's been put into a picture and what a criticizer is pulling out of it. You think you're just looking at an 'image' but there is SO much more going on: ego, too much info, too little info, misconceptions, preferences, vendettas ... and why most folks just chip-in with a feel-good "Nice capture Buddy" – what Ari said.
As ntenny said right off, Ian's commenter should be given credit for at least bothering to honestly state what he saw about the subject matter of this single photograph, having no clue I must assume the picture was part of a series – in which case he might have said, "Bravo, well done, Ian!"
Hell, all this yada-yada makes me want to see the full monty!
Sponsored Ad. (Subscribers to APUG
have the option to remove this ad.)
To be frank David your views are meaningless and in fact quite worthless :-) You have an obsession with IR film, something I haven't used since 1979. . . . . .
You need another coarse of corporal punishment, where's Nurse Hicks, he'll don his stockings and suspenders to admonish you.
A 10"x8" negative/image really doesn't work well at 600 pixels wide . . . ..
Ian
Ian, if you're only going to get angry if people say what you don't want to hear, I shall say nothing further.
I shall just direct a question to "coigach", who says:
<<I'm not sure that I'd pay too much attention to the negative comment as the poster has obviously misunderstood what you were trying to achieve.>>
Don't hide your light under a bushel, "coigach", if you're so much smarter than me and have understood the picture where I have so dismally failed, please share your insights with us!
Er David, I was talking about the original poster Ian quoted, not you
Taken in the context of Ian's other images (gallery + website) I'd suggest that he is trying to show landscapes with the echo of human history on them - he is an industrial archeologist after all! I'd say that he was trying to show a particular landscape as it is - warts, mineworkings and all - rather than an idealised 'picture-postcard' view. So far so good.
Where I have a problem is that beyond the statement 'this is the real landscape' it doesn't say much else (a bit like the accusations levelled at 'picture postcard' views, but in reverse). What point is he trying to make? Is there another point?
I accept that seeing this image in a wider sequence might make this observation redundant, and I said this in my original post.
As has been pointed out, reactions to an image are totally subjective.
That being said, I studied the image, and like some others, don't quite "get it". It is definitely of documentary value, but I don't see where it goes beyond that. Caveat: this is coming from someone who is decidedly not fashionable in their tastes:I appreciate what might be called "aesthetic" photography (eg Weston, White, Porter, etc., sometimes dismissed here).
The postmodern stuff leaves me cold - often clever, but also often failing as images unto themselves, and needing much in the way of propping up with stories, captions, etc.
I was reading recently a comment (in the context of a review of a show at MOMA) that art abandoned aesthetics some 30 years ago. I can believe that.
.
Linear Mode
