"They are art."
Ah, Jeremy! That's something that I have been thinking a lot about lately; I don't mean Ezra in particular, just the entire photographic oeuvre and how it fits within this vague definition of stuff that gets defined as such.
In fact, having observed a large number of documentaries on various painters, including, quite recently, da Vinci, I am being drawn ever closer to the conclusion that 'art' doesn't exist at all, that it's nothing but a fabricated definition for things that are, in general, perfectly useless but nonetheless pleasing to one or two of the senses. Do nimble fingers create art?
Hanging off this thought are the various genres within photography seen across this website and others. Broadly, it's about various forms of landscape, peoplescape, news and practically anything else at which you can point a camera, but where the art?
We like to soothe ourselves with claims to having a grand eye, an enquiring mind and an acute sense of observation of the passing world and even, where possible, of the past via nostalgia (one of my own addictions). But art? Really? It seems to me that perhaps, if there actually is art, then it resides in music by virtue of it being unseen, lives in the mind, is wholly pervasive and able to cross time and distance at the flick of a switch. How else can one be transported back to the 50s, 60s or any other time that was personally important? Yes, the movies, but even there the accent comes from the soundtrack without which even the Detroit chrome loses some of its glow. Speaking of which, perhaps the car, just a mechanical buggy that has, however, come to represent so much more to its owners (and to those who see it) is another emblem of grand design and, at times, a higher art?
The suspicion is that we are in a state far from grace; that we grasp at anything in the wan hope of finding salvation from both ourselves and the very nature of life.
Rob C