about goodbyes by
jmritzComment by ubique: About goodbyes; that’s a good title. Apt. I embrace it, especially as my membership expires in a few days.
Well, it’s the usual last page placement for you, with this stellar 21/27 finish.
Wait a minute … 27 entries? That’s pretty telling. All this time, all these cameras, all these impotent megapixels scattered like spilled spermatazoa, all these blathering forums, all these arguments about Canon versus Nikon; and still there’s just 27 entries, of which 25 are most mercifully forgotten as far as I’m concerned.
What is a camera if it is not an instrument for divining the soul? Sounding the depths of the human condition?
Using a camera as a mere recording device is such a dismal thing. I’m convinced that almost all of the people who own cameras are the worst possible people to possess them. It’s like guns; the only people who should be allowed to own a gun are the people who don’t want to. Or politicians: the only people who should be allowed near public office are those who abhor the idea and would refuse it.
So, 27 entries. It makes sense. When DPC was young, digital photography was young. Almost everything was new. But now, digital photography has become democratized such that it’s no more difficult, and no more notable, than drawing breath. Any mutt can do it, and so they do. Over and over and over again. Bow wow wow.
So how difficult, how admirable, how heroic, is it to consistently (more than 1000 times!) stab holes in the very horizons of what’s comprehensible, what's acceptable, in an age when the popular desire is to reduce everything to a simplistic, mindless meme instantly understood by everyone in the world?
Je suis Charlie, and so forth. Answer: it’s very difficult indeed, and the price you pay is to be on the last page every time. If there were a page after the last page, you’d be on that.
But what if you can do this 1000+ times, always knowing in advance what will happen, ever knowing the weight of willful, even eager, mediocrity that will blanket and smother you, and you still do it anyway?
I can’t tell you how much I admire you for that.
This photograph is in the Purple Heart tradition. You keep bleeding for people who in the most part have no fucking clue what they owe you for your blood.
But let’s put aside all that noble-but-misunderstood artist stuff, before you start hacking off your ears. Let’s consider the thing democratically; with just say 10% of our brainpower. The challenge is to,
“Take a picture where a car/automobile is the main subject in your picture”. So the lumpen, leaden interpretation of that is to show a picture of a car that is unequivocal and documentary. This is a car. This is a sexy car. This is a bright, shiny, sexy car. Or an old car. A grungy, rusty old car. But almost no one shows us what a car is; what a car means. The figurative essence of a car from a humanistic viewpoint.
But you do. Thank you.
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