Pushing my work

This week I decided to continue working with my idea of photographing the ground and photographing looking up. I liked the idea that I would be mapping my experience of the world in a different viewpoint. In this light I decided to push my idea of mapping my experience. I started to take only pictures of the ground and above but I added another element: Randomness.

In class we started a debate about the qualifications for photography as an art form. People raised points about the interference of the machine being something that might make photographic art less intentional than the art of a painting for example. Basically, the question of whether or not the photographer was an intentional artist came up through this discussion and the accusation that the photographer might not be a completely intentional artist did upset me in many ways.

I believe any kind of art form is always going to be subjected to criticism and manipulation of the original intentions when it is viewed by an audience. But art does have intentions and we have already seen that photography is an art form in our culture. Therefore, photography must too have some kind of intention by the artist, even if that intention or meaning behind the work changes when it is viewed by an audience. To deny that the artist does not have control over their photographic work is like saying I don't have control over my speech, or what I write here in my blog. In addition to choosing what my photographic project or image will be, I can always choose not to show an image as art at all. I think it is time to ask ourselves why we are asking the question about intentionality in photography, not whether or not photographers as artists have as much control in their work. We know that photography is held by our culture as an important art form, and photographers as important artists with intentions and therefore this becomes a question about why we as a culture feel the need to question the validity of photography as an art form. Surely this tell us something socially about ourselves.

I wanted to investigate this idea more. Why is it that one thinks every detail of art should be perfectly planned or else it might not be art? I am an improviser and interestingly enough, the performance art I perform is based on loose rules that rely on randomness to create the art of the improvisation itself. For instance, in a long-form improv show you are working with your fellow performers to create something that is based on random interactions between each other. There is no way for us to know every detail that will have occurred by the end, and that is what makes the end conclusion so beautiful. During the performance and in the ending, the audience is left to read the scenes as the wish, making connections that we as performers completely invite them to do, but in no way would have made those same connections. Yet this comedic performance art is accepted and the same type of randomness in photography is questioned. Why is this?

Of course comedic theater is different than photography, but it too is social as all art forms are. Is it just the safe realm of comedy that allows the randomness of this performance art to be so accepted? Perhaps it is that in our everyday lives there is already so much randomness that people feel art should be grounded in control of some type. But I argue that randomness in photography might be more interesting, as real life happens randomly. There is beauty in randomness to me and I wanted to explore this idea in my photos.

So for a large part of my photographs this week I walked around with my camera pointed either up or down and when I felt the urge to take a picture I pressed the button. I did it when I felt something, when I saw something coming up, even when I heard something interesting. I wanted to surprise myself with the images and I wanted to question the idea that this type of project would somehow be less intentional than my other work. I would argue actually, that I had a lot more intention in this work than that which I started with. I can't come up with as good of reasons as to why I took pictures of graveyards in sepia tones as to why I did this project. I feel this only makes the work stronger.