I''m certainly not an art critic, but I suppose I play one here.
I''ve made a few comments on photos relating to abstractness. Roughly, I call it abstract if the photo could just as well be of something that it isn''t. Sometimes a photo is quite nearly abstract, but there''s something concrete that slips in there, and does not allow me to suspend disbelief.
I''ll give you an example of something I thought to be abstract when I took it. In this photo for the "curves" challenge, I tried to take a photo of "curves" using a fence, not a picture of a fence. Curves is an abstract thing, a particular fence is not. I tried to focus the camera on the ground to avoid getting too much detail on the fence, though I doubt that was something I needed to worry about. Something that crept in is the foot in the lower left corner, and once I see that, I cannot force the photo to be abstract at all anymore; It''s now completely attached in my mind to a particular situation in the real world.
Sometimes a photo look like the subject is really the shape, structure, etc, of the physical object being photographed, rather than object itself. That''s when I call it abstract.
* This message has been edited by the author on 6/10/2002 1:15:17 PM.
|
