The L.I.E.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

"We're not the first to come here with government divided and uncertainty in the air."
-- President George Bush, Jan. 24, 2007

Anonymous said...: "Uncontrolled Scenes from Exit 18..."

Is photography not ABOUT control? About what you CHOOSE to include in the frame, and what you choose to exclude? Or is it all about random chance? Haven't all the great works of art been carefully thought out? If all the images are random, are we then merely passive examples of the Borel-Cantelli lemma?

Help me understand your way of working, please.

Harry Whitfield; 11:41 AM
Blissville said...: Photography IS about control, and what is framed and what is not. And where one stands, and when one presses the shutter. As a working photographer I have controlled those elements for years. And I agree that art is thought out, even at its most spontaneous (the drawings and notebooks of Van Gogh, for instance).
I think of this more as an experiment, what happens when I let go of that intention, what pops into the frame, what I miss. Sometimes the camera sees what I never witnessed. Most times it can't catch what I observe.
I am not alone in musing about if a camera could be uncontrolled. Robert Frank used to set his camera on the self timer and throw it up in the air just to see what it caught, how it framed.; 6:04 PM
Blissville said...: I forgot to add -- that said, I love your questions and will continue to think on them more.; 6:05 PM