Well, people find people interesting, for one thing. Interestingly all sorts of stuff like "leading lines" and "light advances" and whatnot are all a crock, what eye tracking studies consistently find is that people identify the faces and human figures in the frame, and look at those, and that's pretty much it if there are any people.
As for meaning? I dunno. There's more human meaning in a random figure walking down the street than in a waterfall, no matter how dull the former and interesting the latter, isn't there? The waterfall is beautiful, sublime, perhaps the hand of god, but it's not *human*.
"Interestingly all sorts of stuff like "leading lines" and "light advances" and whatnot are all a crock,"
Yes, and that's the problem that people who want to set themselves up as teachers of photography, art and the like face: you can certainly teach the history of those subjects, and it should be taught wherever people gather to learn about the arts (something totally, and understandably, absent from my obligatory night-school course when I became a company photographer trainee), but apart from teaching the mechanical how-to bits, the ability to teach another human being how to see or, rather, get something graphically and sensually pleasing onto that blank canvas or sheet of film/sensor when confronted with a subject - is a dream. Yes, you can demonstrate how you, as teacher, would do it, but does that imply that the student can then go on and extrapolate a personal development through that example into his own future work? And even if you could, would you, then, be reproducing clones of yourself? The student first has to have the ability in his makeup. If he has that, you can go on to hand him the tools and point out some short cuts. You can't create the genes. Does it make sense to produce all those silly sketches of visual reverse-engineering and expect some poor sap to carry that index file around with him in his head, along with the complicated camera in his hands? Paralysis seems a likely product.
But insofar as landscape not being static: it depends what you define landscape to mean, whether you refer to the physical bits, the influence of the seasons etc, upon how those bits look. Claiming that a waterfall falls and thus, by definiton, can't be static is a bit disingenuous. Saying you can't stand in the same river twice is also twaddle: of couse you can, and you do every time you clamber into your waders and go fishing in it - only the water is changed (even if of exactly the same quality), not the river. There things are just handy little phrases that people latch onto because, on the face of it they look like truisms, but they are really just false analogies and misapplications.
When you can't change the object or control it, hey, you have to accept that it won. All that you can do is skirt around the problem and adapt whilst the object itself remains immutably itself.
Then, you have to decide whether the importance to you is that you are creating something new, or whether it is sufficient for you to observe what is happening
and would still be happening, regardless of your presence there or not.
Do you want to start with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, or are you happy just to read?
People photography, in the sense of street, is no more creative because you still lack control beyond standing in one spot and waiting for something to happen. If you start to direct people, then you are hardly doing street: you are creating cameos of whatever you had in mind. It might be fun, it's creative, but it an't street!
Rob
