Momentary blissby
odriewComment by ubique: It is not easy to persist with an alternate, wilfully low-fidelity vision of photography when you know it will be widely dismissed and underestimated (and I say ‘persist’ advisedly, because this image is no lucky fluke – you obviously know exactly what you are after, and how to get it, and this is clearly not your first try).
With modern digital hardware & software it has become ridiculously easy for virtually anyone to make photographs that will ‘wow’ the family and friends, and even earn the popular acclaim of fellow photography enthusiasts. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. But mostly it’s bad.
The desire for popular approval imposes a sort of artificial selection process; certain kinds of images are routinely ‘selected’, while others – the familial black sheep – are suppressed. Thus the photographic gene pool shrinks, and every photograph begins to look more or less the same as every other. It’s like dog shows, where breeders pursue in a frenzy of misguided inbreeding a prescribed ideal to the point that the ‘best’ dogs soon differ from the rest only in details nearly imperceptible to anyone but a breeder or a judge (i.e. people who have forgotten what a dog is actually for).
Photographs such as this one of yours represent a random mutation, a shot of unfamiliar DNA from some exotic land. You sneak into the DPC village and seduce a few of the more impressionable damsels (or blokes, as the case may be) with thrilling visions of some foreign place, some wicked bohemia of strange lighting, eccentric compositions, and all kinds of deliberate ‘distractions’. You break all the rules. And you even manage to impregnate a couple of the villagers, so that their own photographic offspring will carry forward some small part of your artistic DNA. It’s just a flicker of change in the grand scheme of things, a tiny spark, and yet that’s all it takes. The village is changed forever, and for the better. You cause the blur of just one water drop, the rendering just one ladybug in scratchy monotone, and you can die happy. In some small but imperishable way you will be immortal.
I therefore award you the Charles Darwin Medal for Magnificently Mutant Photography. Congratulations. And thank you.
This is my pick for best photograph in the challenge. 10.
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