Photography resembles acting more so than visual art these days; it is not so much who we are, but if we happen to be at the right place at the right time, speaking to the right person with the right tools. If we happen to be by the right shot in the right light with the right lens and expose it to the right people......right? Wrong. How about this:
Photography is a process of deciding what it is that we want to make beautiful. Do we want to make poverty beautiful? War? Do we want to make suffering beautiful? Death? Because, whether or not we realize it, our photographs have a life of their own. They will, like flowers in the sun become beautiful, whether due to the time they represent, the historical event they color, the talent that they encompass, or the message they speak. These speaking flowers have words that we taught them, and like our children, do we want them whispering curse words in the dark, or rather, shouting laughter in the light and through summer lawn sprinklers?
As life has a way of taking it's course despite our human protests, despite long nails against chalkboards, so art has the power to run its own course, to become quite colossal in beauty. So we must be careful, as to what we place inside of a frame:
You see, due to our education, practice, and experience, to put something in a frame makes it beautiful. A portrait of an Elizabethan Queen. Beautiful. A mural of the bombing of Dresden. Beautiful. A dusty image of the second world war. Beautiful. I disagree. If you take rapists out of prison, and put them in a photo studio they are so rotten they they become glamor.
Identity is a process of the things we wish to accept into our being, just like the images we choose to accept into our photo stream on flickr, or the food we decide to digest into our body, or the lack of love we let infiltrate our marriages. I do not watch movies that deal with infidelity and I do not watch films that include a gunshot. Am I sensitive? Extremely. I must be so to create art that is more than noticed, more then appreciated, and to create myself among the same guidelines. Do I then belong among the Elitists? Yes, please sign me up. It is not so much that to be good is to be rare but to fasten ourselves to the words of Stanislavsky (i) "in general is the enemy of art". Through exposing ourselves to situations we are subconsciously encouraging how good we let ourselves become, just as an encouraging word can motivate an artist to move forward.
We teach ourselves that if it is on Broadway, it is good theater, and if it is not, it is not, yet, good. Community theater is crummy. Commercial theater is cool. Poor man's theater is an excuse for being poor in talent. If your greeting card appears with American Greetings, it is good. If it does not, it is bad. When did we start relying on other people to tell us when we can start and stop doing what we love? When did it become important to make for Hollywood, instead of to make for quality? I see, the fame gets in our eyes. It gets in mine too; I always have visions of famous ones dancing in my head. For me, they are mirages and mistaken and zapped of any reason, thought, or purity.
We teach ourselves to appreciate that which has boarders. These boarders can be commercial, geographical, artistic, political, what have you. We love America because it is not Canada. We love Canada because it is not America. We love to hate the Christian religion because it excludes dirty sinners who do not believe, we love to hate President Bush because hate and injustice have an accent, we love to hate Terrorists because their destruction is somewhere in a far off place [not here!]. It is clear, we love to hate.
To make the choice to make everything beautiful is to reject the bittersweet texture of free will and fate that has been bestowed upon us as inhabitants of this very world. To make the choice to make everything beautiful is an impossibility proved so by its own negation. If we do not decide that some things are ugly, and continue to always sift through to extract the goodness in every thing, we are loosing the very battle that proves that there is any good.
It may be confusing what I am saying: am I saying we are all one and without boarders? That corporate is always bad? That beauty and sadness cannot exist within hate? That lawn sprinklers are not for grown ups?
I am saying that
beauty
only
exists
in
good
and that as artists, our job is not to expose all things in their large or small grandeur.
but to make the beautiful more beautiful.
without this specificity, we are not a continent with stormy weather but instead a
lack of a lack of a lack.
-KlbK
