Abstraction
Abstraction in photography is the norm and Non-Objective work is impossible.
We are tied to the object as photographers, it is the nature of the machine. The machine that has a shutter and allows light to create a near perfect likeness of the object. Though in the process of gathering information we often forget that this photograph, this piece of plastic, this mere arrangement of pixels is no longer the thing itself. It has lost it’s reality, been stretched through time and along the way losing at least one dimension.
It is all a lie.
Still a lie we’ve believed for so long that now we argue about the objects in photographs as if they were real.
They are not.
The only real property the photographer can claim is the arrangement of data on a disk, the plastic paper on which the image is replicated indefinitely or the sheet of cellophane that through the magic of chemistry traps the moment. That is real, that can be owned and fought over.
Expressionism
When I read Robert Motherwell early in my art career (read: prior to my obsession with abstraction in photography) he made the argument that: Non-Objective painters painted the way they did because those expressions were not available in nature. I’ve struggled with this idea ever since, it is one of the driving forces that fuels my obsession with seeing.
Did it not exist when he said it, and we just learned to create it in the world after seeing it on a canvas?
Or Did it always exist and we just didn’t see it until it was painted on the canvas?
Participation
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