Comment by dmbche
3 years ago
If anything, this is a neat art piece asking "Why do people take pictures?".
I've found often that the gut feel that makes you take the shot doesn't necessarily know when you have the right composition or what the subject of the shot actually is, you just hit he shutter, you know that this was the shot.
Then, when looking at the shots, you have all the time and the world to analyse and find meaning and beauty in this sliver of an instant.
By replacing this by a random seed, a 20 word prompt and gps localisation, I doubt that anyone would have a personal connection to the image, or to the instant it was taken. It become a "clean", "sanitized" image, that's only esthetic (or arguably memetic depending on your prompt), and is wholly separate from the person that took it.
You also lose all of the information that you can not consciously perceive while taking the shot/writing the prompt, since you filter what you see through the lens of language, and then back into visual.
It's neat !
Fun exercise if you're new to photography is taking photos and cropping them to let's say 1/4th the size. You often get photos giving you a completely new perspective on things you've seen many times.
For example it's easy to make a photo look like it was taken from a non-existing tower if you crop the upper part of a regular photo. Or you can focus on details that you always skip over because there's something more eye-grabbing nearby.
This is also why I love to see photos made by people who visited my city for the first time. They don't know which parts are pretty so they capture stuff I wouldn't think to photograph.
“giving you a completely new perspective on things you've seen many times.”
This always been my idea of what makes a great photograph.
I am a lousy photographer. I never get that "this was the shot" feeling.
I assume I could develop it with practice. I just never did. I rarely had a camera growing up, and now that I have one with me all of the time, I treat it like the Instamatics I used to have. The pictures are terrible.
At best, they're a kind of bookmark that I was at that place and saw that thing. It won't have an emotional resonance for anybody but me, and for me it's just bringing up the much better picture in my head. If they want a good picture of the thing, I'll go find one that somebody else took.
All of which is to say... I really admire good photographers. I respect their work, and the diligence it took to develop their eye.
This is, as you note, an interesting art piece on that same subject. I'm afraid I'm better with words, so this is mine.
It's really hard, maybe impossible to come up to a new place and instantly take a good shot.
You need to stay there, move around, explore the space, the light, the interaction with the living.
Eventually you find a good way to tell the story of the place. You get lucky. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it isn't.
+1 to that
I didn't take pictures I was proud of before going to protests to take pictures of people there, and trying to frame them as "badass" as possible.
Now I mostly shoot animals and landscapes, but I've been doing it for years at every oportunity I get, so my "gut feel" is strong there. I'm not great at portraits, for example, and have 0 interest in street shooting.
For what it's worth, maybe try to write down your thoughts on places that matter to you, when they do (kind of like a picture). Or a quick freeform poem