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Author Topic: Not so light reading.  (Read 9268 times)

Rocco Penny

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #20 on: April 24, 2013, 09:51:34 am »

I didn't understand the question for a while,
but now I think I do.
Please bear with me as I interject with almost unintelligible gibberish
nothing to do with art or photography

Jatakamala (The Marvelous Companion, Life Stories Of The Buddha)
cool reasoning for seeking out good
big text, really pretty illustrations

any poetry
(mostly confined to the San Francisco scene 1850-present) (also ancillary historical texts/documents)

 these  are the only I've bothered with the last 3 mos.
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Gulag

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #21 on: April 24, 2013, 11:29:59 am »


Not at all: it was the fact that the founding fathers of the rest of us trekked their way across the world out of Ethiopia before there was any such commodity as oil to fuel transportation that we find ourselves where we do. People always travelled; they had to once they'd ruined the land where they were.

Later on they did it for kicks or conquest, often the same thing. A little friendly rape 'n' pillage was huge incentive for the poor sods who had to don the armour and follow the leaders. Hot damn, even the travel expenses were paid by the state! Maybe that's where the attraction of location shooting today really comes from.

And so it continues...

Rob C

In your first example, it took more than 10,000 years for them to reach all major continents. They had to keep doing it because that was only way for them to survive because of limited resources in any given locale for any hunter-gatherer bands of humans. When population could no longer be sustained, they had to split and move on. In other words, they didn't travel for leisure or for sightseeing even though that might have been the best time for traditional landscape photographers/painters and poets if they had existed then.

In your second example, they did it out of necessity because of the social/political/economic driving forces behind those events. In other words, they didn't do it for leisure or sightseeing,  as the term travel used in the modern lexicon, such as travel industry.

If you look back at the dawn of modernity some 500 years ago,  people traveled to far away places looking for resources to benefit their masters/nobility/clergy/money class. The concept of sovereign state was invented so that a structure could be instituted to carry out those large-scale, expensive, labor-intensive, resource-intensive sea voyages that couldn't be done by any small group of 'entrepreneurs.'  Before modernity, knights purchased and maintained their own weaponry and horses. Kings/queens didn't pay for knights' services since it was their duty to fight for their kings/queens for free. With the age of fire arm arriving at the dawn of modernity, weaponry suddenly became very expensive and largely stayed out of reach of knight class,  that had been largely devastated financially due to the plague started about 100 years earlier killing lots of labor aka peasantry . By now, kings started to demand payment from knights so that kings could finance their own purchases of weaponry, and hire their own mercenaries. At this particular juncture , a small number of those knights, who were still financially capable and had bigger asset base,  submerged and transformed themselves by pouring their leftover money into resource-seeking (aka trade) projects with other nobility and merchant class to become the all new capital-holder class. Subsequently, some of them and their sons/grandsons were employed by the state as military commanders so that they could ditch their other day job as archbishops entirely. Of course, Joe 6Packs got drafted into service to fight and die for capital holders.  This whole episode of the European history couldn't have happened without Martin Luther's Reformation movement paving the road first because for the first time money had been regarded as something not only just good but also holy openly (since one can do God's work with it now.) Europe at this time entered what later called capitalism.

In retrospect, before John D Rockefeller made oil cheap by streamlining the entire process , the percentage of people who were able to afford to travel for leisure was very very small since only the ruling class, ie nobility/clergy, was able to afford the financial cost and time cost. Sightseeing for the masses is a very recent development brought by Rockefeller's cheap oil.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2013, 11:43:15 am by Gulag »
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"Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images."

— Jean Baudrillard

Wayland

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #22 on: April 24, 2013, 12:26:54 pm »

I didn't understand the question for a while,
but now I think I do.
Please bear with me as I interject with almost unintelligible gibberish
nothing to do with art or photography

Jatakamala (The Marvelous Companion, Life Stories Of The Buddha)
cool reasoning for seeking out good
big text, really pretty illustrations

any poetry
(mostly confined to the San Francisco scene 1850-present) (also ancillary historical texts/documents)

 these  are the only I've bothered with the last 3 mos.

I'm not quite sure what is going on here either.

I thought it was a simple enough question to find out what decent books there were out there about digital photography for more advanced readers.

I really did not expect it to become an argument about whether some guy I've never heard of is really the most interesting man alive.

I have at least half a dozen friends that have probably had just as challenging lives but they don't agonise about what tortured artists they are. They just get on with life.

I know dozens of others that travel all over the world working with charities expeditions and NGOs. One of my mates cycled to Australia just for the hell of it, another lived with San bushmen for six months. What has any of this got to do with photography?

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Wayland. [/S

Rob C

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #23 on: April 24, 2013, 02:14:24 pm »

What it had to do with photography was that it indicated how having the right sort of mind, probably an enquiring one, would help with the process of becoming a photographer with those rare things: ideas.

Whether simplistic historical/political generalizations have anything to offer, though, is something else.

Anyone can expand and complicate any simple concept: it's what much of modern business is good at; not actually at producing much anyone wants, but making highly optimistic claims about that which it does produce...

Now that's something quite relevant to the world of photography, isn't it?

Rob C

Rocco Penny

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #24 on: April 24, 2013, 03:06:25 pm »

I read Ulysses while hitch hiking- took 4 years,
the dirty version of course,  I tried reading homer but just got stuck on every sentence
Only opened the book while my thumb was out.
Maybe one of you saw me...don't worry, I never expect a ride from any one.
I guess I never really understood joyce either,
that thing he did,  talking to you from the page...
then speaking in terribly obscure and poetic verse, weaving a web,
now and then giving three or four meanings to every verse,
tying in the explained with the unexplained,
giving a reader the chance at bliss or worse.
In this, I am here reminded.  If you understand all the books you have read, why do you need to stuff more info in there?
Sasha does that too...

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Rob C

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #25 on: April 25, 2013, 04:56:34 am »

I read Ulysses while hitch hiking- took 4 years,
the dirty version of course,  I tried reading homer but just got stuck on every sentence
Only opened the book while my thumb was out.
Maybe one of you saw me...don't worry, I never expect a ride from any one.
I guess I never really understood joyce either,
that thing he did,  talking to you from the page...
then speaking in terribly obscure and poetic verse, weaving a web,
now and then giving three or four meanings to every verse,
tying in the explained with the unexplained,
giving a reader the chance at bliss or worse.
In this, I am here reminded.  If you understand all the books you have read, why do you need to stuff more info in there?
Sasha does that too...




Rocco,

These are good points. To an extent, I think that too much reading does as much harm as good: it substitutes real time experience for second-hand imaginings. I think the proof of this is to be found in the very act of reading when one has nothing else more pressing to do with one’s time. That’s a pretty awful confession to make about the status quo and the solution, as ever, lies in one’s own actions. Actions, not passivity. Is one indeed passive when reading? Ultimately, yes, I believe so; even as the mind wanders off the tale I think it realises the futility and searches for something else.

Whilst photography often fails to deliver the required fix, it does at least physically occupy time in trying. I simply don’t think I’d have survived the deathly silence at home these past four-and-a-half years without it to occupy parts of my mind, the other bits filled with sounds from cassette or radio. It’s an escape from finality, the end of days or whatever one likes to call it.

It solves nothing, hides a lot and one may believe for a moment that it fills a vacuum. That’s probably as good as it gets.

But I don’t find that balm in books: the ones I gravitate towards and actually buy are photographic and about people I admire and have now mostly left the studio.  (Let’s hope Annie doesn’t read this, and is still paying the rent – but her one representational tome at home was a disappointment.) These leave me with even more regrets about those people I never knew but felt that I was intimately acquainted with by virtue of their work. My book from Jeanloup Sieff is especially difficult to handle without a sense of deeply held regret at what is lost. The charm of the man comes out of the pages like a gentle voice, both from his images and his writing, a soft melancholy that finds an empathy in me that is irresistible. I imagine him catching his pictures, a smile on his lips at the  sense of the ultimate futility behind all of it. But at least he did exist and is not forgotten.

Maybe writing on the Internet resolves as little.

Rob C

WalterEG

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #26 on: April 25, 2013, 07:27:57 am »

I see it as being either RECEPTIVE or PRODUCTIVE.  I apply the same rationale to movies and TV.

Cheers,

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Rob C

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #27 on: April 25, 2013, 09:45:18 am »

I see it as being either RECEPTIVE or PRODUCTIVE.  I apply the same rationale to movies and TV.

Cheers,




But can it be both at the same time?

Rob C

Isaac

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Re: Not so light reading.
« Reply #28 on: May 17, 2013, 03:13:29 pm »

I found a book titled "Seeing Fresh: The Practice of Contemplative Photography" by Michael Wood ...

Thanks for mentioning that, I'm finding it quite interesting.
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