She, who has to be obeyed ...

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

From a stroll in the park today.
One bird on one pole - three images ...
Cheers
~Chris

She, who has to be obeyed No.1

She, who has to be obeyed No.2

She, who has to be obeyed No.3

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

I wonder why this is going totally unnoticed.
Anything wrong with these images or scared by the freaky title?
Cheers
~Chris

[RSL]

Sorry, Chris, but there's just not that much there. They're technically competent pictures of a bird. That's all.

[Jeremy Roussak]

Sorry, Chris, but there's just not that much there. They're technically competent pictures of a bird. That's all.

I'm afraid I have to agree. I'm also not terribly sure how the title is relevant - and, to be pedantic, it's a misquotation: Haggard's Ayesha was She-who-must-be-obeyed.

Jeremy

[WalterEG]

Hey Russ,

Ain't life grand when you and I agree 110%?!

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Sorry, Chris, but there's just not that much there. They're technically competent pictures of a bird. That's all.

I'm afraid I have to agree. I'm also not terribly sure how the title is relevant - and, to be pedantic, it's a misquotation: Haggard's Ayesha was She-who-must-be-obeyed.

Jeremy

That's interesting.
Interesting for me, because I see so many images here which to my eyes essentially have not much in them as well,
but spawn comments and discussions, even positive.

I am not sure it's only the possible lack of content,
but maybe the irritating relation between the title and mundane (bird) content.

I actually have read Sir Henry Rider Haggards book "She" many, many years ago,
after it was mentioned in a book by C.G.Jung about Archetypes.
The title is an intentional misquotation, and I am happy at least Jeremy knew it.
I don't think Mr. Haggards book is very popular today, though it has it role in the history of the so called "Lost people" adventure novel.

The title came to my mind after reviewing the images and the situation I had taken them in:
I came to that pole with the seagull (or is it a dove? No idea ..) after chasing the crows posted in my other thread (no idea why these should be more interesting than this one here).
She just sat on the pole and didn't move.
I took images from every side, using my flash many times.
She remained unimpressed and just looked.
It was so different shooting this bird, sitting like a Buddha on her (or his/its) pole, letting me do my thing without taking any notice and even ignoring the flash.
It was so much above me and my puny attempts to get the shots that the title came to my mind when processing the images and reiterating the scene in memory.

This bird humiliated me in a way by not moving and making it so easy to take the the pictures and staying unimpressed - just like the audience - which I find a funny coincidence actually,
especially Walters comment basically telling me the images are 110 % boring shit - like the bird telling me "Do what you want - I don't give a shit..."
Maybe fantasizing the audience is subconsciously identified with the bird is a bit of a stretch - but who knows ... just trying to understand the fail.

The images in themselves (at least the first and the third) had this sort of spooky atmosphere which fitted the mentioned novel (at least as I remembered it) that I finally chose the title,
which basically was sort of a mock-up of Haggards book and a self-ironic comment to myself about my shooting experience in the same moment.

After writing this up I think the meaning of the images was far too subjective to myself,
maybe even self-centered around my personal experience with this bird in a way
that I basically missed the opportunity to bring the message across.

Sorry, didn't mean to bore you.

Cheers
~Chris

[kencameron]

Sorry, didn't mean to bore you.

Nothing even remotely boring there. I was thinking about your images while taking the dog for a walk up the hill (and also taking some probably-to-lots-of-people-boring images of my own). If I had seen yours side by side on the wall of a gallery, printed very large (or very small with a very large frame and matte, an underused device, IMO), and been asked to write something about them in curator-speak to go on a discreet little label on the wall, I would have suggested that you had intentionally given us three very different styles of photograph - the first mock-romantic and moody, high contrast with the bird looking to one side, perhaps embarrassed, against a cloudy sky, the second flat and documentary with the bird as if skinned and pinned to a white ground, captured in the unpitying male gaze of the camera, and the third (my favorite, because the bird now has personality) a kind of joke take on those ornithologist flash shots of a rare bird looking justifiably aggrieved at being captured for someone's twitcher list. If I had been smoking something (else) before writing the label I would have gone on to suggest that "she who must be obeyed" is the muse of postmodernity and not just a bird, and that the subject of your trilogy was an ironic take on photograpy as representation, and not just a bird.

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Nothing even remotely boring there. I was thinking about your images while taking the dog for a walk up the hill (and also taking some probably-to-lots-of-people-boring images of my own). If I had seen yours side by side on the wall of a gallery, printed very large (or very small with a very large frame and matte, an underused device, IMO), and been asked to write something about them in curator-speak to go on a discreet little label on the wall, I would have suggested that you had intentionally given us three very different styles of photograph - the first mock-romantic and moody, high contrast with the bird looking to one side, perhaps embarrassed, against a cloudy sky, the second flat and documentary with the bird as if skinned and pinned to a white ground, captured in the unpitying male gaze of the camera, and the third (my favorite, because the bird now has personality) a kind of joke take on those ornithologist flash shots of a rare bird looking justifiably aggrieved at being captured for someone's twitcher list. If I had been smoking something (else) before writing the label I would have gone on to suggest that "she who must be obeyed" is the muse of postmodernity and not just a bird, and that the subject of your trilogy was an ironic take on photograpy as representation, and not just a bird.

ROFL - Ken you made my day ... (still laughing).
Thanks !
Cheers
~Chris

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I think this is one case where the combination of the photos plus backstory (and the other comments here) add up to a much greater experience than just the photos alone.

I'm glad I came back to this thread after finding nothing to say the first time I looked.

[RSL]

Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned any work of art has to stand on its own. Backstories don't change that.

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned any work of art has to stand on its own. Backstories don't change that.

I'm not sure if you can really say that so apodictically.
I agree, that the amount of bullshitting around an image should be kept to the minimum.

But to quote your initial critique:

They're technically competent pictures of a bird. That's all.

That's actually not entirely true, since they're not just bird pictures.
There are several layers of meaning in this series, some of them self ironic some just silly some semi-serious,
which partly could be understood by understanding the relation between title and pose of the bird / style of the images.
Ken could relate to it, but he had my post with added bullshitting as a help.
I think my fault was not to provide enough information from the beginning to give a clue -
partly because I myself had to decipher what I had done after I realized the series just went "poof".
Some of the information already was in the images, but got overlooked by the critiques:
- The mini showcase of styles - which was intentional.
- The overly dramatic mocking in the first and third shot, especially in conjunction with the title.
- The same subject in all three shots, which also was depicted in the title.
I (wrongly) had expected this would intuitively be understood and I also mistakenly assumed someone (because of having a mature audience of a certain age here) would
be able to decipher the title and draw his clues and therefore did not provide any additional information - which in this context here - was a mistake.

What I am learning from this is, that providing the right amount of information about the image context,
like shooting situation, fantasies around it and so on without drifting into spamming bullshit is a challenge,
especially if the format is a series or mini-series which has a not immediately obvious little story in it.

I think we could even agree about "standing for itself", if we agree, that the piece of art in that case is not the single image in itself,
but a little story with meaning told with the help of images - a photo micro essay so to say and I didn't deliver the full piece in my initial post.

Cheers
~Chris

[RSL]

Chris, the "backstory" matters when you're doing documentary, not when you're trying to produce something more than that. When you do documentary the story is everything. When you do street, the implications are everything. When you do birds, unless you've done something that can stand on its own as a work of art, they're just birds. Here's an example of a bird that doesn't need a "backstory" or any other kind of story. I've posted it before, but it was a long time ago.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you were trying to do with these bird pictures; maybe you just meant them to be a record of a trip into the yard with a camera, but if you were after criticism of them as art, well. . . you just got it.

[kencameron]

Chris, the "backstory" matters when you're doing documentary, not when you're trying to produce something more than that. When you do documentary the story is everything. When you do street, the implications are everything. When you do birds, unless you've done something that can stand on its own as a work of art, they're just birds. Here's an example of a bird that doesn't need a "backstory" or any other kind of story. I've posted it before, but it was a long time ago.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you were trying to do with these bird pictures; maybe you just meant them to be a record of a trip into the yard with a camera, but if you were after criticism of them as art, well. . . you just got it.

This is richly arguable, not least in relation to your apparent view that there is some sort of hierarchy of photographic genres with street at the top. But setting that aside, I think we need to explore what is meant by "backstory". You would probably agree that cultural context is important in responding to works of art. Think of all those images of some fellow nailed to two pieces of wood. Where it gets tricky is the relevance of the artist's intentions.  At one level, these are sometimes part of the cultural context. What Picasso, Braque and others intended in certain works of art is best understood in the context of the backstory of cubism, and the works themselves are best understood in that context.  I would agree that the intention has to be apparent in the work and not just in commentary (works for cubism - its analytic intent is surely apparent in the works themselves) and I would also agree that critics are fully entitled to conclude that artists simply didn't achieve their intentions. A lot of modern visual art with that purports to be about contemporary political issues is open to that criticism. But taking that line also puts the onus on the viewer's capacity to understand the work. I think you are indeed misunderstanding these works which I take to be, in some sense, about "photographing a bird" and not just a about a bird - or as you put it, about taking a trip into the yard with a camera. I think that "photographing a bird" (or taking a trip into the back yard with a camera) is a legitimate and interesting subject for art. This is a "cultural context" issue - as I tried to intimate in my parody of a curatorial utterance, awareness of certain kinds of meaning is part of the cultural context of contemporary art. Your egret picture does not carry that kind of meaning and can be fully appreciated without any sensitivity to it. It is certainly technically competent and it is also very beautiful but I would have to say that as a work of art it is to me only moderately interesting. That is because my tastes are in line with Arthur Danto's definition of art as an embodied idea (and his view that art doesn't have to be beautiful). I take pleasure in the beauty of your image but I don't find much in the way of an embodied idea in it. Or, to put it differently, I respect what you were trying to do when you pointed your camera at a bird, but I think that your approach does not exhaust the artistic possibilities.

[RSL]

Interesting philosophical discourse, Ken, but the only philosophy that actually applies to photography is Cartier-Bresson's: "Photographing is nothing. Looking is everything." To a competent photographer the second part of that statement is self-evident, but there are far too many people out there with cameras in their hands bent on demonstrating the truth of the first part.

[Bruce Cox]

Maybe if they were closer together.

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

To Bruce: I am experimenting with various layouts, but don't yet have a solution for this one I like enough. Thanks for the input!

I finally summed up this communication disaster for myself:

A joke told wrongly never works.

I think its just that simple.
Note to self: Try better next time.
Cheers
~Chris