Totally undifferentiated "wonder" isn't what I'm looking for, Rob. But photos that tell me everything I might want to know about the subject get pretty boring pretty quickly, IMHO. So, the kind of ambiguous photo that I like is one that suggests at least some boundaries on the viewer's speculation, but still leaves room for the viewer to exercise some imagination.
Eric
And IMHO too, but is that really where we are both standing?
The reality, through my eyes only, of course (and how 007 is that!) is that we can all expect far too much from photographs, when they are totally incapable of delivering what we, the viewers, determine that they must. Photographs are not magical; at best they are can be beautiful and offer some satisfaction by provoking nice thoughts or, alternatively, pot ugly and provoke a sense of distaste, which is where the strength in much negative reporting can be found and works well. Photograph a riot and you can make it say pretty much what you want it to say; photograph a landscape and it says what the weather was like, where you were and possibly with whom.
I enclose another delightful little quotation from a chat between Eddie Adams and Robert Farber:
RF. "Which assignments made you happy? More than others".
EA. "Basically, other than that, as long as people are involved see because you have to remember they have architectural photography, but I think the pìcture of a beautiful building but... somebody made that building. That's the person who created the picture, not the photographer, the person who made that building. And then you have the light from the Sun... God created that light, not the photographer, but the photographer went there and just took a snap of it, and all of a sudden he's an architectural photographer."
There's another delight, which I can't find again, where David Bailey is responding to someone who spoke to him about 'art photography' and was questioning his (Bailey's) objection to the terminology. Bailey responds to the effect that you don't talk about art sculpture or art painting, so why treat photography differently...
So you see, perhaps I'm not the best chap with whom to have these 'artistic' chats - I tend to regard them with deep suspicion and not a little skepticism. After you've made a few thousand pictures and been paid to do it, you come to the conclusion that at best you are competent, have an eye for it, and that's pretty much all there is to the thing. The only people I see making fantastical claims for photography are those who have never actually made much out of it. For those who have, both in the professional life as well as the others who have simply been able to latch onto the art market, the truth is that with time, they both prefer agents to do the selling for them because the agent can sell the bullshit where the photographer reaps only embarrassment at the nonsense he has to purvey.
It's a tough life at both ends of the spectrum.
Rob C
