The other night Susan and I went down to the library for the awards ceremony for the
Romancing the Arts exhibit.
I had entered one of my photographs, and though I didn't expect to win any sort of recognition, I was excited (and more than a little nervous) to finally show a bit of my work after almost 30 years "out of the scene", so to speak.
There are some excellent pieces of work on exhibit. If you haven't gone yet, I urge you to head on down to the library and check it out. This area is blessed with some real talent.
Having said that, I must say that I was stunned that not one piece of photography received so much as a ribbon.
Apparently, if you don't have a brush in your hand, you're not considered an artist of any merit around here, and to me that's sad.
Now, before you start going off about my sour grapes, please believe me when I tell you that my lack of winning any personal kudos is not my point. There were quite a few photographs on display besides mine, all of them quite well done.
There has been a debate about photography's place in the art world since the first daguerreotype. The recent evolution of the digital age and Photoshop has possibly hurt that argument more than it has helped.
Today the rage in Photoshop is all about manipulating. The push these days seems to be to present photography as something else.
The "paintbrush" look is huge, as evidenced by the number of entries with this "look".
When I went to a recent Photoshop seminar, everybody, including the instructor, was more interested in what can be done to turn the image into something else, rather than such mundane things as color balance and sharpness.
I'm pretty old school. My favorite photographer is Edward Weston, and I'll never forget the time, at about 16, when I saw my first Ansel Adams exhibit. His photographs took my breath away.
He and his contemporaries were quite rigorous in how photographs were to be shot and presented. They wanted no resemblance to any other art form; they wanted their photographs to stand on their own.
Today you can never be sure if what you are seeing is actually what was photographed. That bothers me a bit. It's kind of like watching Roger Clemens pitch and wondering if he cheated. Or like watching Barry Bonds hit and knowing he cheated.
Today you have to wonder, were those clouds really that color? Were there really clouds there in the first place? Was that barn even in that field? So much can, and is done in Photoshop these days that a photo presented in the "classic" sense almost looks outdated, or simplistic.
In that sense I can see a judge's hesitancy to compare a photograph most likely manipulated in a computer with something he or she knows was done entirely by hand, with a brush.
However, putting together an art show and lumping everything as one, then picking only the paintings as worthy of credit is kind of like having a show on personal transportation and giving all the awards to cars while ignoring the bicycle. Sure, they took more to produce, but really, are they any better?
Perhaps in the future the Greater Castle Rock Art Guild will see the wisdom in dividing their judging into the different disciplines,not dumping them all on the same table, and with the same jurors. In the meantime, I'll continue to support local artists. Really, the talent is incredible.
As far as the photos manipulated and printed to look like paintings, though, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston are probably rolling over in their graves.....