On 3/21/2015 11:44 AM, Tina Manley wrote:
...
I use "edit" as Maggie Steber, a professional photo editor, does. She
winnows out the keepers from the rest. She does not process or re-work or
recompose. She edits.
I am free to use any word as I see fit. If a friend uses wombat to mean an unborn flying mammal, I may adopt that usage.
HOWEVER, I should expect others to misunderstand me, thinking I am writing about an ill tempered marsupial from OZ.
I don't know who Ms. Steber is. I do not think she is some sort of generally accepted authority, unless within some
small, specialized group. Your insistence on this uncommon usage in photography has caused much misunderstanding here,
frustrated you and others, wasted your time and that of others and caused some ill will. It doesn't even matter if you
are "right", in some technical sense, if you are misunderstood.
Anyway, misunderstanding over, here, at least for now.
PS: The Cigar Lady is one of my least favorite shots because she is
posing. But that's just me.
Indeed, and that may be where looking 'in' from the outside, as viewer, is different from looking out from within, as
the one who captured or created a work.
Bob says "...Cigar Lady ... clearly transcends stock photography ... to the rare air of art." As someone who has
actually sold a fair amount of fine art photography, he has some modest claim to expertise.
Moose says the Cigar Lady is a talented performance artist and I would be happy
to have been her collaborator.
Performance art does not exist without an audience with which to interact. I am reminded of the pun in the title of a
really wonderful play I saw recently, "An Audience with Meow Meow". What this highly talented performance artist meant
is " An Audience collaborating with Meow Meow to create a performance." Cigar Lady's carefully crafted performance,
including at least location, props, costume and pose, is not complete until it interacts with an audience. For all we
know, she may have picked the colors and painted her backdrop. You, one of her audiences, joined her as co-creator by
presenting it in altered form to a new, wider audience.
I recently had a mild disagreement on TOP with Mike J. I had proposed that several of my images were 'good', although
unlike some definition or other he had proposed. My referenced images included one almost wholly a square of one color,
with very subtle variations. In that moment, he argued intellectually why it wasn't meaningful, interesting, or art. A
few days later, as he was editing prints submitted for a contest, he was moved by what he called a very similar image,
but in blue. It moved him, so it was Art, and he apologized to me in print, I imagine recognizing my point that it's the
viewer that makes an object ART.
As with Bob, something happens inside me when I look at Cigar Lady, "... like a fresh cool breeze blowing away a cloying
fog. I can _see_." That makes it Art, however and by whomever created.
Enjoy.
Moose
--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
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