Mon
19Addiction and Art
Right, so I think about photography non. stop. I’ll wake up in the morning and the sun will be filtering through my tiny basement window, through the grass and the drops of dew and the first thing I think about is how I’d light that with my camera. I think about aperture and depth of field while I’m eating my cereal, and I lust over lenses and outrageously expensive strobist light kits. Needless to say, I’m a little obsessed.
It’s not just the actual act of photography that fascinates me. It’s about freezing a moment in time. It’s about your camera seeing things that you can’t see. It’s about fuzzy blurry Bokeh1 and sharp focused peeks, about color gradients and all of the subtle nuances that photography encompasses.
It’s about capturing the spark in people’s eyes that tells their entire life story without the use of words. It’s about how each one of us is connected to one another, and how quickly seeing a photo of a happy face, or a sad face, or an excited face can change our mood. It’s about community and solitude at the same time. It’s about that feeling in my stomach when I take a shot and it turns out exactly how I pictured it. It’s about the excitement I get out of dragging a bunch of new photos into Photoshop to resize them or edit them or leave them as-is. I take it pretty seriously.
It’s about life. It includes every aspect to who we are and to why we exist. Everything that is known to exist has already been photographed. Everything has already been done, but it’s the freedom in doing it differently that ignites the excitement. It’s about beauty and pain and hope and love and hatred and nature and dogs and beer and cheesecake.
It’s about shooting a cliche photo of a flower that’s been photographed god knows how many other times already, and still finding joy and beauty in it. It’s about looking up at an evening sky that looks just like a Monet painting, with yellows and pinks and greys and blues and greens.
A lot of people argue that photography isn’t art, because it doesn’t stand within the boundaries of traditional “art.” I think that’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard. Many cultures all around the globe don’t even HAVE a word for art, because it’s a definitive aspect of who we are. It isn’t separate from our daily lives, art is everywhere all the time. I don’t care what curator, art professor or miserable pretentious elitist tells you, there is art in everything. And besides, who the fuck is anyone to say what is or what isn’t art? There is no weight in the negative opinions of others regarding anything you make, because somewhere in the world, someone else loves it and finds value in it no matter what it is. That goes right back to it being about community.
I’ve always been a pretty creative person, and I’ve looked for a long, long time for that perfect medium. That one thing that I’m better at than anything else. That one act that encompasses my entire life, that all inclusive art form. I’ve found it. You can only go so far with things like painting or writing or making jewelry or whatever other creative thing I’ve ever done, and the possibilities that lie within my little lens? Endless.
1 Bokeh describes the rendition of out-of-focus points of light. Differing amounts of spherical aberration alter how lenses render out-of-focus points of light, and thus their Bokeh. The word “Bokeh” comes from the Japanese word “boke” (pronounced bo-keh) which literally means fuzziness or dizziness.