I’m aiming more toward just the visual: not telling the story, not describing a place, but just making a great photograph, whatever it takes. Whatever works is whatever works. It might be that nobody even knows what image is, but the colors, shapes, forms and textures create a feeling in you, though you don’t know why. It’s like music without lyrics. There’s a melody there and it makes you feel certain way, but you don’t know why. It’s just sound waves. These are just light waves.

Carr Clifton - www.carrclifton.com

Carr Clifton says some viewers decry any digital retouching of an image, but he’s quick to point out it has been always done. And since it’s all in the service of a creative vision, there is no right-and-wrong rule book.

“Some people complain: ‘Oh, you’re digitizing and manipulating,’” he says. “Well, it’s just an artistic expression. Now we can be even more an artist. You have more tools and creativity at your hands. It’s phenomenal.”

Take cleaning image of an errant pinecone, for example. Clifton explains that he does the same thing in the computer that he’s always done with film. “We used to digitally remove them anyway with digits on our hands,: he explains. “Grab that pinecone and throw it out of the scene. People pretend ‘Oh, I didn’t touch a thing.’ But I don’t know. Moving the camera is manipulation. Move a little to the left or right… So taking garbage out of the picture? Absolutely. Taking a jet trail out of the sky? Absolutely. Taking the dirt off it? Absolutely. Moving a person into the image. I haven’t done that. I haven’t moved a sky into the image either. I’d love to do that with some photos, but I haven’t done it yet. Pretty soon, nobody will even care. It won’t even be an issue. It’s all part of the creative process.

“I think it’s like writing,” Clifton continues. “You have fiction and you have nonfiction. And you believe the person who writes a nonfiction novel – that it’s true. You know the fiction writer made it all up. It’s the same thing. We trust news to have total truth in that newspaper; they don’t make that story up. This is creative endeavor. People can do whatever they want. If they want to change the color or put a bird in a sky, they can do it. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned. It’s just who wants to do it. I don’t care to, but if they care to, that’s their own business. As long as they’re not saying it’s nonfiction. If they’re claiming that this is true nature in their image, well that’s one thing.

“It’s like writing a story,” he adds. “You could have 10 people see something happen and then they all write a story about what happened. Well, it’s all nonfiction, but people have accentuated certain things that happened – they each saw it from a different angle. It’s the same thing with photography – like when you make a print. You’re going to tell the story, and you’re going to put certain things in parentheses and you’re going to capitalize certain things. It still tells the truth!”

From interview with Carr Clifton by William Sawalich

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good - it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.

George Bernard Shaw
Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909

Photography is not a pure art. It was born a bastard and it changes all the time through its relationships with chemical, optical and electronic industry.

Catherine Coleman
Curator of Photography at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

- Remember what John and Paul said.

- The Apostles?

- No, The Beatles: “All you need is love.”

Michael, The Movie

Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own (will), is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Apostle Paul

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

John Lennon

April issue of Art Calendar magazine arrived to my mailbox. Usually I spent 2 minutes browsing it but today I found a gem: an article “Choices” by Jack White. I could not help but to make some quotes for myself:

Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to circumstances. You choose how people affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: it’s your choice how you live your life.

We are who we are because of our choices.

Today is the tomorrow you fretted about yesterday.

People can only hurt us if we give them permission.

There us no sin in failing. The sin is in staying down.

…photography is more than mere craft. Photography is, or can be, a way of life. Beyond cameras and equipment, beyond film and chemistry lie the mysteries of the creative life shared by those who strive to communicate and express themselves clearly - fine art photographers, commercial photographers, amateurs and professionals.

Brooks Jensen, Editor
Preface to every edition of LensWorks magazine

Photography is a bit like electricity: We know how to use it, but we don’t really know what it is. My yearning is to get deeper and deeper within the medium to ideal picture that’s “A Photograph,” not an example of what photography can do or how it’s applied but what “A Photograph” would be. Don’t tell me what it looks like, or how it’s done. What is it? And I know in answering that question successfully one would not only define the medium but would make a photograph unlike any we’ve previously.

You see, if you’re making a painting it’s additive - you keep adding on brush strokes until you finished. When I do photography I’m more like the guy who’s chipping away - subtracting at the sculpture, chipping away at the stone block. I take as much out of the picture as I can. So I get into it just what I really want. The graphic quality in a photograph is only as good as the feeling it produces.

Samuel Goldburn really put it very succinctly when he said: “If you have a message send a telegram.” Well, I don’t have a message to another person in my photographs whatsoever - I’m simply working with the medium.

What people like to refer to as “The Message” is all about my personal dialogue, introspection, self-communication. Now if you must call that a message, go right ahead, but it’s not a message in the normal context of the word. A message is from one person to another.

Ralph Gibson
A Few of the Legend. A Series by Peter Adams
LensWork No.43

Sergiy,

I truly appreciate your very honest and sincere comment to the previous entry in my blog. Not very often people talk and discuss such things as meaning of life. I started to write you an answer but it grew up in something bigger than a simply reply. I took a liberty of quoting your message and posting it along with my answer to you as separate entry in my blog. I hope it is ok with you. I believe these things are important and I don’t want them to get lost somewhere in comment archives.

Here it is:

I knew you were going there. All your recent posts showed it clearly and it was just a matter of time when the main question was going to be posted - the meaning of life. I bet everyone in their life has asked this question once and so have I. Sure enough; it was painful to find a satisfying answer. Nothing seems to be right or make sense at all. Then I figured that that was exactly the problem. Trying to find the reasoning, I mean. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But it worked! Well, at least for me.

When one is looking for the answer to the meaning of life he or she is never searches for the answer to the meaning of death. Why, indeed? Death is the natural end of life. It’s clear and hence does not require an answer. Period. But is it really the answer? Does one really know what death is? You can’t really answer this question until you are there and when you are there you cannot communicate back to those who are alive. Meaning what? Meaning, we don’t ask ourselves this “meaningless” question and rather focus on searching the answer to the meaning of life instead.

If you are asking where the heck I am getting at, I tell you to the answer I found for myself, my friend. The meaning of life is merely life itself in its infinite variety of biological forms including us, human beings. It is as simple as it gets. I believe that the answer mustn’t be complicated. I think simplicity rules the Universe. One can like it or not, but on that scale nothing matters at all. All is everything and everything is all.

The Why we live is not a question to me, but the Why we think is. Human’s mind is the biggest mystery to us, life forms.

* * *

Same as you were I was searching for an ultimate answer to this ultimate question. And at age of sixteen or seventeen I came to a logical conclusion similar to yours but more “mathematically rational” in a sense: there is no answer since the question is stated incorrectly. It does not meaning that ultimate question to the meaning of life does not exists, nor does it exists for that matter. It only means that we are asking an improper question. It reminds me and old anecdote: An airplane pilot asks his navigator - “Course?” and navigator answers - “33!”, “What’s 33?”, asks the pilot and the navigator replies - “But what’s the course?”

The fascination I found in Viktor Frankl’s ideas is that he completely turned around tables on you. He writes:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, rather must recognize that is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

What does it mean? It means that we should stop asking ultimate question of meaning of life but instead give answers since we are who being questioned. What questions you may ask? The questions we are faced every day, every hour. We may not even verbalize these questions, but they do exist. We, humans, are proud of the fact that we are the only beings on this planet who possess consciousness, free will. We make conscience decisions and actions every day, every hour. They constitute our life, our being.

Unlike an animal, man is no longer told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do… or he does what other people wish him to do…

So, the questions are: Why do you do what you do? What is the meaning of your daily conscience decisions and actions? What is the purpose? We have been told that we have a free will. But what is the meaning of things we are willing? What is that you want and WHY do you want it?

It may seem that we made a circle and we are back to the same old question about meaning of life. Not at all. There is a very distinct difference between an old search for ultimate question for meaning of life and answering questions about meaning that life asks you. The quest for meaning of life, if you dig deeper, refers to life as a fate, mission, or destiny, extrageneous and indifferent to you, your wills and desires. You must fulfill it. Period. It is forced upon you. There is no escape. It is like death. On other hand, being questioned by life is intimately personal and ultimately unique. It comes to a simple question: What is that I want in my life? And the question the life asks you in turn: Why? What is the meaning of it? Often we are lost to answer even to the first question. And sometimes it might take a lifetime to answer the second one…

That’s what I think about it…

I’m on the second book by Viktor Frankl - Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning. I usually skip forewords and prefaces but this time few sentences have caught my eye and I read Preface to the book very carefully. The offered passage is quite big but I like very much Viktor Frankl’s flow of thought towards religion. It cleared some mess in my head and I found it very helpful, well, at least for me.

* * *

The concept of religion in its widest possible sense, as it is here espoused, certainly goes far beyond the narrow concepts of God promulgated by many representatives of denominational and institutional religion. They often depict, not to say denigrate, God as a being who is primarily concerned with being believed in by the greatest possible number of believers, and along the lines of a specific creed, at that. “Just believe,” we are told, “and everything will be okay.” But alas, not only is this order based on a distortion of any sound concept of deity, but even more importantly it is doomed to failure: Obviously, there are certain activities that simply cannot be commanded, demanded, or ordered, and as it happens, the triad “faith, hope, and love” belongs to this class of activities that elude an approach with, so to speak, “command characteristics.” Faith, hope, and love cannot be established by command simply because they cannot be established at will. I cannot “will” to believe, I cannot “will” to hope, I cannot “will” to love - and at least of all can I “will” to will.

Upon closer investigation it turns out that what underlies the attempt to establish faith, hope, love, and will by command is manipulative approach. The attempt to bring these states about at will, however, is ultimately based on an inappropriate objectification and reification of these human phenomena: They are turned into mere things, into mere objects. However, since faith, hope, love, and will are so-called “intentional” acts or activities, along the lines of the terminology coined by Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, the founders of the school of “phenomenology”, these activities are directed to “intentional” referents - in other words, to objects of their own. To the extent that one makes intentional acts into objects, he loses sight of their objects. Nowhere, to my knowledge, is this brought home to us more strikingly than with the uniquely human phenomenon of laughter: You cannot order anyone to laugh - if you want him to laugh, you must tell him a joke.

But isn’t it, in a way, the same with religion? If you want people to have faith and belief in God, you cannot rely on preaching along the lines of a particular church but must, in the first place, portray your God believably - and you must act credibly yourself. In other words, you have to do very opposite of what so often is done by representatives of organized religion when they build up an image of God as someone who is primarily interested in being believed in and who is rigorously insists that those who believe in him be affiliated with a particular church. Small wonder that such representatives of religion behave as though the saw the main task of their own denomination as that of overriding other denominations.

Certainly the trend is away from religion conceived in such a strictly denominational sense. Yet this is not to imply that, eventually, there will be a universal religion. On the contrary, if religion is to survive, it will have to be profoundly personalized…

To all appearances, religion is not dying, and insofar as this is true, God is not dead either, not even “after Auschwitz,” to quote the title of a book. For either belief in God is unconditional or it is not belief at all. If it is unconditional it will stand and face that six million died in the Nazi holocaust; if it is not unconditional it will fall away if only a single innocent child has to die - to resort to an argument once advanced by Dostoevski. There is no pint in bargaining with God, say, by arguing: “Up to six thousand or even one million victims in the holocaust I maintain my belief in Thee; but from one million upward nothing can be done any longer, and I am sorry but I must renounce my belief in Thee.”

The truth is that among those who actually went through the experience of Auschwitz, the number of those whose religious life was deepened - in spite of, not because of, this experience - by far exceeds the number of those who gave up their belief. To paraphrase what La Rochefoucauld once remarked with regard to love, one might say that just as the small fire is extinguished by the storm while a large fire is enhanced by it - likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicaments and catastrophes, whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.

Viktor Frankl
Preface to the First English Edition
Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning