I'm a native New Yorker (grew up in Jackson Heights, Newtown HS, Queens College, now in Bayside) and have been bike riding through the five boroughs forever. About ten years ago I started bringing a camera with me.
I've recently started a website about my NYC bike riding and photography. As part of that, I have a blog that I use to record some of the humorous or offbeat things I see in my travels.
City Lights Photos
Please read over my bio on the site. I think you will see someone who loves Queens and New York as much as you do."
Thanks.
Mark Lutin
12 comments:
What kind of crap is this, Crappie? Have you lowered your standards?
Nice work a Mark !
An "A" for effort. A "B-"/"B" for content.
Excellent! Great eye.
"A certain type of confusion about the relationship between scientific discoveries and art, leads to a frequently asked question: Is photography an art? The answer is: No. It is a technical, not a creative, skill. Art requires a selective re-creation. A camera cannot perform the basic task of painting: a visual conceptualization, i.e., the creation of a concrete in terms of abstract essentials. The selection of camera angles, lighting or lenses is merely a selection of the means to reproduce various aspects of the given, i.e., of an existing concrete. There is an artistic element in some photographs, which is the result of such selectivity as the photographer can exercise, and some of them can be very beautiful—but the same artistic element (purposeful selectivity) is present in many utilitarian products: in the better kinds of furniture, dress design, automobiles, packaging, etc. The commercial art work in ads (or posters or postage stamps) is frequently done by real artists and has greater esthetic value than many paintings, but utilitarian objects cannot be classified as works of art." - Ayn Rand, "Art and Cognition", The Romantic Manifesto, p. 64
"While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. … Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are." – Susan Sontag; On Photography
"...photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are."
Close, but no cigar.
Photographs can show as much of the world, if not more, that a painting can. It's all in the eye of the photographer to see it, and in the eye of the viewer to understand it. It's a matter of appreciation. Some people let others dictate philosophy to them; someone who appreciates art - whether it be a painting or a photograph makes up their own mind.
Andy Warhol said it best: there's no such thing as a bad photograph.
The fact that you can simply push a button and produce an image is, bien sur, mon ami, fantastique.
However, a photograph is not "art". It's technological not creative.
But then, Andy Warhol thought that the reproduction of a can of tomato soup was great art.
Art is in the eye of the beholder. There is no one standard for what it is.
Andy Warhol:
"You know it's art when the check clears."
And other people have other standards for what is and isn't art. Fortunately, they're much higher.
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