How Relevant Are We?

In every field of human life a person can be relevant. It depends on a mixture of personal features, and the objective need for that mixture at a certain point of History. Politicians, conquerors, artists, writers, discoveres, scientists and Bill Gates, why not. It is the roullete of the specific mixture superimposed with the roullete of the hystoric need, that select people every second to fill a hole.

But I would like to warn at this point, that we humans have a hidden or explicit wish to trascend mortality, by becommng so important that even physical death will not stop the spiritual message of our life, as we catch it.

Yet the word relevant that you have used is very interesting. If this word was not selected by chance, it could mean positive contribution. This is not equal to influence, nor fame. Nor even immediate effect.

Accordingly to which sense you apply to the word relevant, you can go back to the threads of RFF that dealt with these issues.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
If you bake a cake the most wonderful cake, is it truly wonderful if no one eats it. How would they know?

Sure I understand the "shoot for yourself" thing, but again this is a process for achieving something, not an answer for whether the achieving of it is worth persueing in the first place or even if it is achiveable at all.

Eventually you have to define "art" if you want to go any further...

I am generalising, but much of art today is an art of ideas rather than anything else...whoever comes up with the cleverest idea wins the prize. Plus a large dash of having any hint of the past in your picture is derivitive and commits the ultimate sin of modern art - unoriginality.
Art, I have observed in my wisdom, is a matter fashion, just like womens hemlines and the sneaker. The fashion today and in other things in society - is the preciousness and the right of the indivual to be an individual. This brings up the position where art is what the artisist says it is, and it doesnt matterif the viewer doesnt understand completely what the artist intended, it is enough that the artist know himself, the ultimate in self expression you see. This is why "anything" can be art.
I see I havnt yet defined anything...okay for me art is about communication - there are somethings that cannot be communicated to another person except through art, whether it be music or pictures, or the feelings that may be evoked at the end of a story.
Which brings me to my point - ramble about modern art and all - is that if you have a situation where you shoot only for yourself and have no concept even however vague that your pictures should or may be seen, then this an equivilent position to creating "art" only for yourself - as long as you know it then that is enough. But without communication of whatever intent to a viewer, listener, an audience, then it ceases to have any meaning whatsoever, it's "art", and message is simply latent.

If no ones ever sees a photograph then can you even define it as a photograph anymore, since any definition of a photograph must includes a viewer.

Sure you can shoot for yourself, and follow what pleases you, and enjoy the finding and the making of pictures, but without a viewer (God grant us a sympathetic viewer) as far as photography goes, you could argue that you didnt actually make anything at all.
So you have to have art that works, and you have have to viewers, you have to have communication. So without either one you have nothing.

Even Van Gogh, who I think is the one who created the cultural figure of the poor starving artist who painted only for himself (or this concept arose from the historical figure of Van Gogh) desperately wanted an audience. I argue that without one his paintings were not relevant, he himself was not relevant and he went off and shot himself, making himself actually irrelevant.

Someone mentioned Da Vinci - Da Vinci never painted a thing in his life he didnt have commssion for. I suspect the idea of "painting for yourself" would have left most Rennaissance artists looking at you blankly. But then the definition of art has changed since then I think.

The idea of creating art only for yourself, shooting for yourself is a modern concept, the denial of the vewier, the audience, the public as a participant in the art. To take it to the length of cariacature, it becomes simple snobbery, where the normal people at my work I mentioned are not cultured enough to understand it, are not relevant to the artist (!) and there for they simply dont bother with art with a capital A anyomore. They are not invited to that party. It becomes a social phenomonon, where only people of a certain social group are permitted to understand Art and the rest are just the extras in the backgorund of a Van Goh painting forking hay. A form of art fascism.

So maybe its not that photographic art is not relevant ( Rueban I use the word in the sense of "having meaning") perhaps its more that (modern) artists have made the veiwer irrelevant.
 
I you photograph for yourself, then at least one person (you) will like the pictures. If you photograph for others, you may end up with pictures that nobody cares about.
 
The music the masses like in the US is pretty much a waste of my time.

Art has no relevance in this society because we cannot afford to expose children to it in school.
 
sepiareverb said:
Art has no relevance in this society because we cannot afford to expose children to it in school.
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I guffawed, and then I cried.

Back to Carlsen, and your latest post. Photography for me is, for lack of a better phrase, my daily worship, wherein I meditate on the world around me rather than myself for once. ;) Part of my personal effort to stay awake and alive in the world these days is to strip out that archness you're talking about from any of my pursuits that I consider "artistic". When I was 20, I thought people were dumb for not "getting it". Now, I realize that was just part of learning. I needed to be there to be where I am now, which is a place of working to accomplish what I need to for myself, and sometimes develop it in such a way that it might, maybe, do something for someone else too.

Why? Because I think we're all better off when we all do our small parts to help keep each other awake, and that's more important than "sincerity"; rather, it is sincerity, and what I had before was a stop on the way. But maybe I'm full of ****.

And in other words, i'm pretty sure I agree with Ruben.
 
My take is that very few know anything about anything any more. Of course I'm and old coot and remember the 'good old day's' when people knew something. Maybe it was just because my parents were in a circle of more aware people.
My impression is than so many go about with their iPods plugged into their heads, know the scores of their favorite teams, and whatever news the major media broadcasts. They know nothing about art, be it photography, painting, sculpture, dance, music, or whatever. The best beer is Bud Lite, and the best hamburger is from Micky D's. Whoa, it's the weekend, Dude, let's get a pizza and beer and kick back.
Don't let it bother you - just do what you know best and enjoy!
Just IMHO. :cool:
 
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bsdunek said:
My take is that very few know anything about anything any more. Of course I'm and old coot and remember the 'good old day's' when people knew something. Maybe it was just because my parents were in a circle of more aware people.
My impression is than so many go about with their iPods plugged into their heads, know the scores of their favorite teams, and whatever news the major media broadcasts. They know nothing about art, be it photography, painting, sculpture, dance, music, or whatever. The best beer is Bud Lite, and the best hamburger is from Micky D's. Whoa, it's the weekend, Dude, let's get a pizza and beer and kick back.
Don't let it bother you - just do what you know best and enjoy!
Just IMHO. :cool:
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Disagree. Most people have always not known anything to exactly the same degree as they do now. You just have to look harder for the evidence of it before the current age, because very few people had any kind of voice--much less one that would be saved. Hell, most of them didn't even have literacy. The difference is just that you weren't there, and since they didn't have movies we don't have any previous age's version of "Dude, Where's My Car?"

Their non-knowing-anything days were spent living mostly short, ugly lives snuffed out directly or indirectly by the people who left the histories that we find so dreamy and dignified. :p

And yes, you're lucky your parents traveled in those circles. The conversations I heard were about JR Ewing and grocery store wine taste tests.
 
Carlsen Highway said:
If you bake a cake the most wonderful cake, is it truly wonderful if no one eats it. How would they know?

Sure I understand the "shoot for yourself" thing, but again this is a process for achieving something, not an answer for whether the achieving of it is worth persueing in the first place or even if it is achiveable at all.

Eventually you have to define "art" if you want to go any further...
.
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It is only if you go at it from the outset to make the best cake you can to please yourself, that you have any hope of making a truly wonderful cake. If you set out to make a cake that you hope others will others will like, you are stuck following a recipe that's been done before.

The problem with current art is that it is manipulated by art galleries and investors who are mainly looking to make money. Only with time, hindsight, and academic study, will the important art of today be revealed. It's similar to the history of art, where an artist's greatness is often only realized after his/her death. Or maybe that's when the dealers take over because the work is now limited to existing pieces. Oh, well.
 
Carlsen

Excuse me but da Vinci and every other artist has created work for themselves. Da Vinci's left many small paintings and notebooks that were hardly done on commission. You are mixing up work for hire or sale with an artist's creations.

And loads of photographers created works for themselves and their friends exclusively. Think of Julia Margeret Cameron. Isn't it also true that art is relevant only in the way it is perceived by viewer at a particular moment. The 'artistic' soft focus photographs of the late 1800s and early 1900s were images we with our modern vision reject.

Rueben nails it with his several definitions of relevance. Its meaning is different for different people. I can't shoot with an "audience" in mind, at leaast when I shoot for myself.

But I actually do when I work commercially because I need to give the photos a particular 'mmeaning' for its role in a story.

Hawkeye
 
"Look up: Photography Blogs in the Yahoo! Directory"

"Price of Silver, The [read review]
Blog by Al Kaplan recounting more than 50 years working as a photojournalist in the Miami/South Florida area.
thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com"

I have more fun writing the copy than showing my old photographs or shooting new things for the blog. It has certainly broadened my fan base.
 
Is "relevance" not in the eye of the beholder? Just because van Gogh only sold one painting in his life time , was this the only painitng that was relevant?

Is the photograph of the young lady that causes her to eat less, go to gym, loose weight and gain confidence, relevant? Only to her? Or the photograher? Must the picture be rated as art to be relevant?

Thank you for a thought provoking post.
 
Photography is as relevant as you want it to be. Consider commercial advertising photography and advertising. Sports and news coverage in the printed media. Fashion, celebrity, political campaigns, and so on.

Photography is not only relevant, but vital.

Perhaps you meant fine art photography.

That is as relevant as any art is. Which is to say, it is relevant to some, it is not relevant to others. Its popularity waxes and wanes with the zeitgeist, but in general, art galleries and museums are not very well attended by the hoi polloi.

This is not something I worry too much about. Life is too short to spend worrying about why people prefer American Idol and football in place of art.
 
You could say the same for most art forms, and photography to me is an extension of expression, a way of articulating a thought, a memory, a feeling and therefore it's not a given that the one I am communicating to will understand or even get close to what I was attempting to articulate. The same thing in writing or in fact any thought that stirs me to photograph ior write about it. Therefore the only true satisfaction will be found from me doing this for myself as a way of expression, not mass media acceptance. E.g. a recent trip up into Berkshire left me feeling rather cold and switched off by the acerbic nature of modern consumerism and the dull void that Tescos seems to sit at the very epicentre... Would most people get me? No. Would most people try to get me? No. Would most people even hear me? No. But that doesn't bother me. To me my writing and photographs are an extension of my memory, a way of preserving my life's experience.

I don't see my photography or writing with the need to change the world or effect it in some manner, I just want to record the world for what it is and what it means to me. And that's special. And if someone gives me recognition for that, then that's fine. But there aren't many people who will get me when I got off on a crazed manic ramble of the thoughts I sometimes get such as the one when shooting under the Westway in London (an elevated motorway) and listening to the noise, the damp concrete decay hanging all around and the incessant drum of the traffic made sense in the way it was photographed and written about as "the drum of Ballard's thunder..." The point is it means something to me and that makes me happy and that matters.
 
Carlsen Highway said:
Sometimes disturbing thoughts occur to me.

It occured to me to consider how relevant photography both as an art form and as documentary or photojournalism might be to the average person.
I considered this for a while, and hesitatly came to the conclusion - not very.

I considered the place where I work for example. Out of the 400 odd, perfectly normal, average middle class people that work here, how many of them have seen or would recognise or think "special" any of Cartier Bressons' pictures?
The answer is none of them. It is not relevant.

Out of the modern art photographers....also none of them.

Out of the photographers that are practicing photojournalists whos work transends documentary so that it may also be described as art to some degree as well, say Eugene Richards, or Saldago, or simply the successful documentary pjotographers whether their work is considered art or not - how relevant to these average people is it, how aware of it, and how much impact or influence it might have on them?
The real answer is that it is not relevant and has no impact at all as for as I can see.
A good documentary picture may illustrate an article in a magazine, but to be brutally frank, to most people it is another news shot of something.

In a medium where we claim much of our work to reflect life, to inform people, to express our own views of the world - who are we actually reaching in any meaningful way?
Does our interest and passion really equate to a niche interest much the same relevance for anyone else as stamp collecting?
Are we imagining an audience?
I did a lot of painting and eventually came to the conclusion that painting was a meaningless art form nowadays becasue it has no real audience other than for those who have a specialist interest in art.

The only thing that I can think of that has an impact on the average person, and does that through both its craft and art, is cinema.

Do you think I am wrong?
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you are falling for cultural section of newspaper's hype.
cinema is overrated. when you have the main classics being "refilmed" w/ better photography, dolby and current stars.. how can you say it's art?
is velazquez las Meninas being repainted? Is a Cartier Bresson being reshot w/ better lenses?

cinema is entertainment. other than comedy it's mostly boring.
i refuse to watch serious, commited film. it's self indulgent BS.

Art is art. It's big and photography is in the heart of it right now. You want to be relevant?
if you are not pushing the limts of ANY language.. well, then forget relevance.
 
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