Domestic Scenes Sprinkled With Art Theory

What separates an artistic photograph from a regular, posed, unimaginative, dutiful, typical, uncreative picture?

Visual record-keeping clashes with aesthetic theory when it presents to the audience's mind and eye what they have always thought and seen.






These are domestic scenes, from our home, as captured by a camera, mass-negated in sudden and stalwart style.







The accidental ephemeral that coincides with our existence without our organizing it until we quizi-realistically render it via the pretext of some slender methodology in art, music, or thought.









What gives a photo, or any image seen in the mind, the aura of art?

Can you explain what it would take for a photo to move beyond the mundane and takes its place of honor in the exquisite and remote museum balcony porch swing of art?

Shall we say: "An art photo, worthy of being published in Art Forum magazine, would capture the essence of the subject, while doing it from an unexpected or spectacular point of view." ???

Or is there more we can state univocally about art vs. non-art in the realm of myopic photography?






I think I'll have a cookie while you look at these and smile.






Photography, when it strives to be more than just pictures of people and things, when it unattaches itself from plain utility and memory preservation, can become something Else, something that's almost or already Art.







The faster you know what the image represents, or captures, or impresses, or implies -- the quicker you can decide against it being artistic, since it probably isn't.

The harder it is to understand the reasoning behind, the certainized sense of the selective vision of the photo -- the more artistic it probably is.





Art, in the form of photography, doesn't want to show you the same things you've always seen, in the same shape as you normally view them.

Art disorients to reinvent.

A newly winced-at stage or decree.

"But is it art", you ask (and who can blame you?)

I say: "Absolutely!"








Even when a thing of beauty is scrutinized, it must be from a special vantage point or degree of focus, always mindful of how the borders waver and wobble in the re-activation of the visual embrace.







The art of photography ...

[that is, the camera image techniques and styles that seek to be interpreted in the light of what is commonly called creative, artistic, aesthetically correct (or unique or fancy or showy),]

must be understood as arising from (and resolving within the viewing audience) an entirely new way of seeing, being, and freeing.

Seeing what's there but seems unseen.

Being not scared to make it "a scene".

Freeing everything there from the set and said routine.






If a photographic image yearns to be seen not as a snapshot in time of a comprehended normal reality, but rather a work of art, it must be, in a subtle or suspicious way, shocking.

Dislodging the standard seeing, the poised sight, the unpoetic vision, and kicking it solidly, causing it to slide off the edge of dream-willed space.






There lies all around us, up and down and across every vector and spectre, a seemingly unnoticed patch, a slithery swirling, that functions as art if one can frame it precisely and from the optimum trigonometrics.





Some of these random pilings are there each day, while others bend and sway, then go away, before you can catch them, glimpsing past your plight, never to be observed again, for you cannot configure anything that slips like placid gusts in the articulated lagoons of illiterate light.





My photographic eye, the camera mentale, inert sight, does not see actual utilitarian or decorative objects, but focuses instead on such conceptual abnormalities as may be found in dramatic transient color confusions, silver swathes of slippery shadows, and furbished fields of fissures.







This disadvantageous view, re-fearifications of socialized zoo, the few times two of all the stew you used to chew like windows do.






"For lo we see through a dark glass dimly..."






Such-tastic patternings in the stillness, broad bands of episodic light, the clever steadfast art hidden on your floor.






Framing, as an art in itself, can make a small difference seem to be big, because you have spotted color zones in shaped thrones, eloquent bones, equal, authentic, dazzling -- and unspied by the normalized eye.






I don't take photos like most people do.

I prefer the unposed, lopsided, accidental, spontaneous scene.

Usually, I get close-up shots either to emphasize unintended art in reflections and angles OR to disorient and obscure what is exactly the thing being microscopically scrutinized.





You just keep staring at it, through the camera, until it no longer makes sense like it used to do, until you see something unexpected staring back at you, too.

What could be more simple,
sweet, surreal --
than a homemade
whipped macaroon cookie?

If, when you gaze you gain what you guess you largely forgot, then you've got Art.







A peek between the triple blinds of the denatured world.

Photographic art.