BALBOA PARK COMMON LIZARD

... Sunning him/herself on dead root of an Australian Tea Tree...the photograph is definitely NOT a work of art.  I got close to the lizard with my camera by approaching slowly.  

I used the SONY RX100, so I didn't have a long lens.

ONLY IN AMERICA

If you ever see my daily post on the BLOG or on FACEBOOK, you’ll have noticed that until today I’ve been posting only one photograph each day since I “came down” with a stroke on May 4th. I’m a very lucky person. Since January 1, 1987, I had used cameras to “take” pictures, at least one photograph every day, and I chose one to be the picture for the day, the photo du jour.  Since New Year's Day, 1987, I've missed two days, May 4 and 5 of this year. 

Six weeks later, I’m back to normal, whatever normal means/is for an old guy who is pushing close to his 80th birthday. I’ve been dismissed by the neurologist, the neuro-ophthalmologist and the physical therapist. By dismissed, I don’t mean they are no longer paying attention to me, but they have said there is nothing wrong with me that time won’t fix. Without the prism (almost invisible plastic film affixed to the left lens of my spectacles) I’m still seeing double, but that’s a small problem which is fixing itself.  Margaret and I are getting ready for a short trip to Europe… two weeks in Portugal and Spain beginning at the end of this month.

In the meantime, in spite of Donald Trump’s squeezing himself into the clown car today, I am going to do some serious writing this morning… not a rant.  

I was asked a couple of days ago what I consider to be “art” in the practice of photography.  I went to bed last night thinking about it.  My answer is that I often don’t know, or can’t see,  the difference  between art and craft in photography; so I began by asking myself which photographers I consider to be “real” artists and which I consider masters of the craft of photography.  Of course, in my mind I flipped through the photographs and the photographers that come to my mind when I consider the question:  Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, of course…; but do their photographs rise to the level of ART because they are beautiful… astoundingly beautiful… memorably beautiful? Adam’s photographs of Yosemite seem even more beautiful than the places where they were made. Porter’s pictures of wilderness…  Wow!  I recall one of his, black and white, that is mostly wilderness green with a couple of stones just a little to the right of the center of the image... or Judy Dater's Imogene and Twinka at Yosemite... or any of Imogene Cunningham's self portraits... or that portrait Manuel Alvarez Bravo got of a girl , he called it El Ensueno (daydreaming) in Mexico City in the early 1930s... or Alfred Stieglitz's The Flat Iron Building which he got in the first decade of the last century... or Garry Winograd's Orangutan, which he got around the middle of that century.  I say any of those are art, I just don't know why.  Last night as I lay quietly before dropping off to sleep, I noticed that most of those  photographs leave something to happen later, something that we don't know...

…but the pictures by photographers with extraordinary cameras bringing into daily view in newspapers, magazines, and on television unusually spectacular images… all those photographs, however beautiful, can’t rise to the level of art.  So what do I consider art… from among the millions of good pictures released every week?

The pictures that come to my mind, when I think about those that are “stuck” there… the images that don’t go away… are the pictures of people like Henri Cartier-Bresson… the image(s) of the guy in the middle of a puddle jump in Paris or his Greek Island’s picture of the girl running, about to disappear, up the steps of plain buildings.  Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a photo-journalist.  He waded into crowds with his small Leica Carrera capturing spontaneous moments.  Strong shadows didn’t bother him.  Shadows brought his focus sharply to what he considered the important part of an image.  Dorothea Lange’s “Man jumping off a Cable Car”… or Edward Weston’s “Pepper #30 suggest something other than what you see in the image. The most memorable photographic images are those that are interruptions of the moment. 

The San Diego Museum of Art includes a Cartier-Bresson print in one of the contemporary exhibits.  Srinigar, Kashmir, Silver gelatin print from 1948:  “Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Muslim women in Kashmir echoes, if serendipitously, the rhythm of veiled figures in Eugene Delacroix’s painting, Les Femmes d’Alger.  The women, waiting for the dawn prayer, face Mecca as the sun rises, some crouched, some standing. 

I apologize for the shadows in my photograph of Cartier-Bresson’s print.  The shadows are from the lights in the museum.