As everybody knows, the now beloved impressionists were criticized by the conventional art community of the time. So, where does LuLa fit into the characterizations of art appreciation? I’d say we’re conventional with a slight nod to work that is beyond us but does not make us feel too much like dinasours.
But there's a difference in that the Impressionists, by and large, were also able to take the conventional route, but just chose a different direction that demanded the same skills used differently. I have no problem with a trained or natural artist doing his thing, wherever it takes him; where I have a problem is where I think I see absence of skill getting promoted to the stratosphere.
Regarding LuLa's stance: I don't really think that it officially (or otherwise) has one on photographs. Having just written that, I must admit to having a narrow angle of looking: it's a very rare thing that in my LuLa searches for images I stray beyond the
Abstracts, and whatever
Without Prejudice offers. I get no thrill out of landscape, per se, and my regret is that the street people seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Of course, as everybody knows, street has many definitions, but whichever one you adopt, it ain't easy to do. Worse, unlike snaps of the natural world, when your image fails, it's obvious.
I don't really want to use Micheal as an example which might seem a little unkind, despite this being Easter etc., but where I found his pictorial input interesting was in his ability to see both landscape
and street motifs and catch them pretty damned well. That doesn't seem to happen much anymore. I never knew the man personally, but from what I discovered here, he had a previous life in photojournalism, and that makes and keeps you pretty sharp! I suspect that his photographs did, perhaps, lend a sense of direction to the other posters, by paternal/managerial influence, if nothing more. The man had an abundance of style.
It's a common belief that technology has pretty much plateaued these days; perhaps a similar fate has befallen the world of images, too, where so much can be done almost automaticlly that many of the old skills have become redundant and, with them, some of the deeper insights into what one was doing. I believe there is no going back, and that the likes of some of the old stars will not appear again.
