some thoughts about "art"
some thoughts about "art"
For forty years I have been a writer. For thirty of those years I wrote poems; lately fiction. I never made money from poetry; I did make money, because I was seen as a "serious" writer from readings, teaching, workshops, residencies, book contracts, ghost writing, magazine articles, tutoring, editing. Through it all, I wrote the poems and fiction that not only mattered to me, in a practical yet mysterious way I had to write them, all the failures and the few really good poems, it was as if the work itself was as important as the product, the art or the artifacts. This kind of work has nothing directly to do with making money or having a career as an "artist." If I were a religious sort I would say it has to do with stepping away from myself, and taking a step towards something more genuine. And I certainly don't think the IRS is qualified to tell me what art is. They aren't collecting art. They are collecting taxes. Yeats admonished Irish poets to learn their trade-- be part of a tradition and master a craft. But artistry is more than tradition and craft.
I don't have the history with photography that I have with writing. So I don't call myself a photographer and mean that I am an artist with a camera. But the same impulse I have when I write a story or try to find the way to get a character to talk like himself and not like I personally talk-- to get beyond me-- I am working in the same spirit with film. I shoot photos because it seems to take me somewhere that is at once closer to the real world "out there" and at the same time is like a blueprint of what is not exactly visible, but can be felt.
In that sense I completely agree with the examples given above of the four pictures. The latter two, as opposed to the commercial shots, whether they are great art or failed art, they aspire towards seeing the world as it is and in seeing truly, showing the spirit and feel of that moment and place.
There are many people in this forum who, even though they never call themselves artists, nevertheless, when I see their work, I would say they are doing art. Some of our work falls below a kind of threshold and it's not so good; some work rises above and it is good. There is a quality of having captured more than the sum of the parts of the subject matter in the photo. And there is persistence. Doing something because one has to.
The photographer Philip Perkis (book: The Sadness of Men) once said he had been trying for twenty years to take a good photo of some crates by a field of potatoes. That is art-- to come back year after year to try to see and make a picture of those crates, and to not be satisfied until one gets it right. So a lot of failure is built into making a thing like Perkis was trying to make but there is no way to measure it by some set of external guidelines or standards or tax codes. Doubtless even an exuberant shooter like Winogrand knew that most of what he was shooting wasn't what he was looking for.
