Binge & Purge

Photography is a unique art form. With other forms an artist attempts to create something - a figurative likeness, a visual metaphor, an outpouring of emotion, whatevs. But with photography, the author of the work captures a scene, a moment in time, a perspective of reality as a physical representation of his or her expression & sentiment.

Yes, philosophers' pens have bled tomes of rhetoric romanticizing the photographer's ability to paint with light, defining the fetish of the frame, and explaining that a captured scene only exists through the eyes of the photographer - all are true, but photography will always remain a unique entity as a visual art form.

Everyone has some voyeuristic tendency, but photographers are a bit more obsessive - they do not simply appreciate what they see, they must capture it so they may experience it again. That's where the creation process - the art - of photography begins. It's also where photography departs from other art forms, and why I am so intrigued by the medium.

Whereas a painting or a sculpture [even in the case of photorealism] is always understood as a representation or an expression, a photograph is often considered to be reality captured. Since the mediums inception artists - from the Lumiere Brothers and WeeGee to Annie Leibovitz and Andy Warhol - have tested the limits of the reality that exists within the frame of a camera, and though they did so in very different ways, each captured not only a visual presence but also a hyperreality: what that subject represents (kinda the antithesis of Abstract Expressionism). Auguste Lumiere did not captivate all of France with moving pictures of a train station, but with the feeling of standing before a speeding locomotive. Weegee's photos created false reality - stories of crime and horror that actually never happened but were far more interesting than the Truth. Warhol was Warhol - he defined art, photography, icon, et al as we know them, but he took Weegee's style out / to hte next by actually creating the Truth with his photos - creating icons and identities in the real world that were a product of his photographs. Leibovitz took documentary photography and portraiture and gave it a signature - she rejected the Death of the Author to create photographs that are as much a product of her as they are images of celebrity & iconography... and did so with feminine grace. (to be continued...)