Recently I realized that I have tons of photographs which I think are not suitable to post on my website. I’m not talking about technical aspects of these photographs, they are fine. They are different than all photographs I have on my website. Different in subject matter. These are photographs of people. Humans are absent from my website photographs. At least as a main subject. I have photographs of apes on my website, but not humans. Isn’t it ironic? And on other hand I have thousands of photographs of people which hardly anybody sees. What do I do with them? They are not art and I have no intention to sell the prints alike my website photographs. Apparently I have two different bodies of work which almost never interfere with each other. Landscape and nature photography is flourishing and it is fully represented on my website. The other photography - people photography, social photography - hides in a closet. I have to invent something to show these photographs. Maybe within limits of this blog for now. We’ll see…

To make sure that we survive in a dangerous world dominated by scarcity, our genes have programmed us to be greedy, to want power, to dominate over others. For the same reason, the social group into which we are born teaches us that only those who share our language and religion are to be trusted. The inertia of the past dictates that most of our goals will be shaped by genetic or by cultural inheritance. It is these goals, the Buddhists tell us, that we must learn to curb. But this aim requires very strong motivation. Paradoxically, the goal of rejecting programmed goals might require the constant investment of all one’s psychic energy. A Yogi or a Buddhist monk needs every ounce of attention to keep programmed desires from irrupting into consciousness, and thus have little physic energy left free to do anything else.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

I don’t like an expression that an artist making art is expressing himself. I’m not sure where this notion, this meme came from. It implies that artist at his leisure time reflects on his mundane feelings and unconscious desires, conceives an elephant but gives birth to a mouse.

For me making art is duty. I feel that I must make at least one photograph a day, no matter how imperfect it can be. Otherwise I feel just plain bad. If I don’t do photography several days I even slide into a mild depression. Not making art is a sin. That’s how I feel about it.

Life is like crossing an ocean in a small boat with patched holes which constantly leak. Making art is a process of patching these holes and scooping leaked water out of your boat. Not making art means doing nothing about it, letting the water fill your boat until it sinks. Along with you.

San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos has been photographed many, many times. The most famous photograph is by Ansel Adams showing the back of the church. It gives an impression, at least for me when I first saw it, that it positioned in a vast empty space like many Italian churches placed in front of big piazzas. In fact Ranchos de Taos church is very intimate: there is a very small plaza with crumbled pavement in front of the church. It is surrounded by small shops and houses. La Fiesta Saloon is claiming the other side of the plaza. Church is not alone, it does not sand out, it is part of the community. The place is quintessential New Mexico. With a touch of Italy.

When I first came to the plaza at daytime a small children’s choir was rehearsing inside the church. The sweet sound of their voices was spilling into the fresh winter air. The plaza was empty and I spent about two hours not only making photographs but just walking around and drinking Taos crisp cold air like chilly wine. I came back again after sunset. And again nobody was around, just me. The church was illuminated with floodlights and I caught a moment when luminosity of the church and the sky was the same and made almost the same composition several hours ago in daylight. Sweet memories…

[Art] is one of those terms that everyone believes he or she understands - until asked to define them. All too readily people assume that “art”, as they understand the term, is a universal phenomenon, and they tend to ascribe not only the word itself but also all its connotations to non-Western contexts. As a result, we have come to think of “the artist” as a special kind of person who, because of some universal, almost mystical, principle of inspiration, is found in all societies. But notions of “art” and “artists” are formulations that are made at specific points in history and in specific cultures. For instance, “art” as we think of it in present-day London, new York or Paris, did not exist in Middle Ages, when people did not distinguish between “artisan” and “artist”. The notion of inspired individuals who, by their almost spiritual status, are set apart from ordinary mortals is a concept that gained acceptance in more recent West during Romantic Movement (c. 1770-1848), a period when writers and philosophers asserted the ascendancy of individual experience and a sense of transcendental.

… the making of art is social, not purely personal, activity. Art serves social purposes, though it is manipulated by individual people in social context to achieve certain ends. Art cannot be understood outside its social context.

David Lewis-Williams
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

I have to admit that I’m a big fan of Star Trek. Not the original Star Trek and not the latest series, but one and the only one - Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the episodes features Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, and Dathon of the alien Tamarian race, played by Paul Winfield. Captain Picard is captured and then trapped on a planet together with Tamarian captain. They must learn to communicate with each other before the beast of the planet overwhelms them. The Tamarian language, although “translated” by universal translator device, is still unintelligible for Picard, because it is too deeply rooted in local Tamarian metaphors. Eventually Jean-Luc grasps the meaning of Tamarian metaphors and in the end he even enriched them with metaphors from Saga of Gilgamesh.

Enthusiastic Star Trek fans compiled the Damrok Dictionary which has Tamarian phrases like these:

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
dahr-MOCK juh-LAHD tuh-NAH-gruh
Friendship as a result of shared struggle

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh
kuh-DEER moe-moe-TAY
Failure

Mirab, his sails unfurled
mee-RAHB
Departure, “let’s go”

Sokath, his eyes open
soh-KAHTH
Realization, understanding, an epiphany

Temba, his arms wide
TEM-buh
Giving, receiving

I’m telling this story because I think that photography like Tamarian Dathon speaks metaphorical language quite frequently. Every photographic image has to be interpreted in context of culture, religion, history, in context of personal life of the photographer, his relationship with nature and people in his life. Every photograph carries a metaphor. Every photograph is a metaphor. Metaphors could be quite potent but often utterly meaningless to a viewer. In that case photograph fails its main function - to communicate (Kadir beneath Mo Moteh). Question: is it a failure of a photographer or a viewer? Or both? Photographer must try to understand the language of the viewer and vise versa. Photographer should try to speak universal language of art showing a path to his cultural or personal metaphors. And viewer should be visually educated, be ready to accept the path. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I am very certain that many, many people have awakened in the middle of the night with a flash of inspiration about some novel they would like to write, or a play or poem or whatever and that most of these inspirations never come to anything. Inspirations are dime to dozen. The difference between the inspiration and the final product is an awful lot of hard work, an awful lot of discipline, an awful lot of training, an awful lot of finger exercises and practices and rehearsals and throwing away of the first draft and so on.

Abraham H. Maslow

In one of our travels to Tuscany in Italy we stayed for several days in a small village called Lucignano d’Asso. It is hardly a village, it is just a few medieval houses perched on a top of the hill. The whole place is owned by one woman, baroness. She met and greeted us when we arrived late night. The next morning we discovered how beautiful that place was. It was early April, out of tourist season and the village was virtually empty. We had it all to ourselves. We had plans to drive around the country, to Pienza and Bagno Vignoni but instead we stayed and simply soaked the beauty around us. Outside the house there was a patch all covered in flowers. I spent almost an hour crawling around and making pictures. This is a vertical panorama I made from 5 frames. I used 60mm macro lens and changed the focus for every subsequent frame to make the whole panorama tack sharp from bottom to top. There are two different perceptions of this panorama made as a large print: you can look at it from a distance and enjoy the colors and texture and it is totally different from up close when you immerse yourself into life-size colorful flowers.

I think the best graphic images are those where the compositions are less obvious and/or include a counterpoint. That can be the beginning of story. I have always felt that my most successful photographs are like short stories; they say the most with the least. The best photographs don’t always have stories with answers; sometimes they’re stories that ask questions. And, sometimes they’re not stories at all; instead they may be visual poems or visual adjectives.

… Ernst (Haas) always felt that everyone had their own color key (how you connect colors together in a photograph) and their own composition key (how you deal with a photograph’s “hidden structures” …it’s geometry). “It’s something you don’t go out and create…it’s already within you.”-E.H.

Arthur Meyerson
An interview with Arthur Meyerson by John Paul Caponigro

…for some reason I feel compelled to share with other people what I see in the world, what I observe in the world, because I guess I operate under the illusion, or possibly delusion, that other people might be interested in seeing through my eyes. It’s rather egotistical point of view, but it is in essence the point of view of a photographer who believes that for some reason they have the ability to see the world in a way that others don’t, in a way that will be valuable to other people who don’t see the world that they do.

Brooks Jensen
LensWork, Commentaries #10