2018 in review

This is the time of year for best-of lists, so I’m taking some stock of my own work during the last year. This was an eventful year overall for me. I have an enormous amount to be thankful for and many opportunities presented themselves to me during the last 12 months. Still, not every change was positive. No one knows the final outcome of the changes; things might turn out for the better over the long term. Or they might not. The objective and the challenge, as always, involves finding a goal that’s worthwhile and putting your shoulder against it.

Photographically as well, 2018 was interesting year. At the end of 2017, just before Christmas, my wife and I took a road trip to see family in Wisconsin, Chicago and the St. Louis area, before getting home December 23rd.  There were opportunities to photograph in both cities. In March, I was in Phoenix and Tucson, in Arizona, and in Seattle, in April. In May, I had the opportunity to participate in a photography symposium in Moab, Utah, and in July, I completed a canoe trip with my son and son-in-law in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northern Minnesota. All of that was fun and provided interesting challenges photographically. And much of it would seem to contradict one of the key themes of this site, which focuses on the landscapes of the upper Midwest. But the outcome of a sad circumstance—the death of my wife’s uncle who succombed to cancer in late July—meant that I also had opportunities to photograph in rural North Dakota.

If the desert landscape differs dramatically from the Midwest, and if the Pacific Northwest differs from both of them, it’s also the case that each landscape contains myriad photographic opportunities. For that matter, each landscape presents inspiration for many forms of artistic expression. Taking advantage of the opportunities to work in different locations, completely different regions, allowed me to learn and refine my photography during the year. So the collection of favorite, or best of, photographs of 2018 contains images from locations outside the Midwest.

Southeastern Utah presents grand vistas and the Puget Sound region offers some consistent possibility for mystery along with exquisite land- or seascapes; and the mystery in ordinary moments increasingly appeals to me these days. I want to say that again in less new-agey terms. The older I get, the more experience I acquire, the more practiced I become as a photographer, the more I find that ordinary stuff, captured in the right way in the right light, results in more satisfying pictures, in which the interest is more durable. That’s helpful, and hopeful, as those moments arise everywhere, every day.

The poet, Christian Wiman, said that “poetry increases the stock of available reality.” But what does that mean? I think it refers to the fact that most of us go through life immersed in the struggle to get through the day, striving toward objectives that are more accepted than deliberated, and in doing so we miss a lot of what’s in front of us. And when we pause long enough to look, or when something interrupts the short-term focus that stands between our routines and the larger, deeper beauty of reality, we can be confronted with the astonishment that Annie Dillard wrote of when she said, “We write to give voice to our own astonishment.”  

Flannery O’Connor said, in a letter that the role of art is to increase the sense of mystery in the world. And she went on to note that contemporary people have a lot of trouble with mystery. Or at least my generation does. (I’ve heard that part of the popularity of books and movies like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter is that they return some sense or recognition of mystery to our lives, and that appeals a lot to subsequent generations.) My generation doesn’t seem to want much mystery in our lives. When confronted by mystery, we want to identify it, measure it, categorize it, label it, replicate it and control it—in which case it’s no longer mystery.

But life does include mystery. Life is bigger than homo sapiens and the parochial concerns of our species. Our lives will be richer when we see that. So one reason to work, whether our work is writing, photographing, painting or dancing, is to find bits of reality, add them to the existing stock, and give voice to our own astonishment.

Hope you have a great year in 2019!

Winter Solstice

Light and heat are scarce this time of year. It’s just after five in the afternoon when I leave the office and get in my car. There’s still light in the sky, but not much. And the day’s light is fading so quickly that you can almost see the darkness growing as you watch.

According to the calendar, winter just started. In the reality on the ground, the North Dakota landscape has been firmly in the grip of winter for weeks. Tonight it’s already five degrees below zero. The cushioning in the car seat is too cold to compress when I sit on it. It’ll be in the teens below zero by morning. I let the car’s engine run before driving home. My old Saturn doesn’t have remote starting so I try to stop shivering through force of will as I wait for the engine to warm up. I almost succeed.

I’m parked at the edge of the parking lot facing west, watching as the last of the day’s light, now washed out to pastel pinks, purples, and oranges, fades from the sky. At the edge of the parking lot, a few acres of farmland stretch to the west and south. A marshy area to the south of the parking lot is home to a family of quail every year. And there’s still enough open land to support some jackrabbits.

A decade ago, when I started working here, farm fields stretched on and on to the west. Each year, my coworkers and I watched wheat, sun flowers, and corn sprout in those fields in spring, ripen in summer, then mature to a rich tan before the fall harvest. Each year, another apartment block or office building has smothered another chunk of land. I struggle now to remember what this year’s crop was. But the memory of this field as undeveloped land still clings to the place just enough to evoke a sense, a memory perhaps, of wildness.

As I sit in the car, a jackrabbit makes its way across the field. It moves slowly, torpid with cold. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing because – fresh from my heated office – I am so cold myself. The rabbit’s fur is white with speckles along its back, recalling the darker coat it wears in summer. In the waning light, it blends perfectly into the crop stubble and uneven snow cover in the field. When the rabbit stops moving, I look away deliberately, then look back after a moment to try to pick him out again. But he’s camouflaged so well that I lose him almost immediately. Looking hard for several moments allows me to tease out the shape of his (her?) back, head and ears, against the mottled background of the field.

Snow and stubble. A few scraggly weeds. How do you survive a North Dakota winter on stubble? Not everyone does; the bodies of a few rabbits inevitably appear from beneath melting banks of snow in spring.  On this night, it’s still early in the winter.

The car, while not close to being warm, is at least drivable. I back out of my parking space and slowly head home.

Four days later and 130 miles northwest of that parking lot, I commit what I saw to paper, describing the scene in my notebook in a few quiet minutes on Christmas Day. At one point I pause in my writing, look up and let my gaze drift out of one of the bedroom windows of my in-law’s house, looking outside as an icy wind flays the few shriveled leaves still clinging to the branches of an apple tree, rocking even the larger limbs of the elms and cottonwoods beyond it in the shelter belt at the edge of the yard. Realizing the conditions outside as I remember my thoughts and perceptions from a few nights ago, I’m transported back to the parking lot outside my office, trying not to shiver before driving away and leaving a lone rabbit in the middle of a field in sub-zero temperatures on the shortest day of they year. It was one of the loneliest sights I’ve ever seen.

                  *                                   *                                *

A few hundred yards north of where I sat that night – and on a stretch of land many times larger than the ground the rabbit huddled on – sits a shopping mall, packed with consumers getting serious about Christmas shopping. I imagine their moods ranging from a sense of urgency, to a sense of desperation. They move amid the light and warmth, buying gifts to add to lives already overburdened with material excess. The living recipients will be owned by the inanimate objects given as gifts, rather than the other way around. We buy and we give – and we receive graciously – because we want to be nice, because we want to be people who act in a spirit of giving. Perhaps we give in an attempt to re-create some mythical memory of the “perfect Christmas,” which endures in artwork and advertising. Most of us have never experienced something as perfect as the images of the “perfect Christmas” that we hold in our minds. We go through the ritual because we’re social animals and it’s just in our nature to do it. It’s not bad in and of itself.

It’s difficult, therefore, to clearly define the aspect of Christmas that instills such misgivings within me. Some aspect of that unease is the perception that I’m not quite getting it right. The gifts aren’t quite what’s wanted; the decorations aren’t quite Martha-Stewart-perfect enough, the gatherings I’m part of don’t quite capture the spirit of warmth and fellowship and love that we think we shared in celebrations past. And so carrying that realization as I shop, I find that it’s possible to experience loneliness inside a mall, jostling thousands of strangers, shopping in the hope of contributing to our Christmas ritual in a way that will bring happiness to my family.

I’m not alone in this. Clinical depression afflicts a number of people at this time of year, partly attributable to the reduction in daylight in the northern latitudes. Or so I’ve heard. Yet even for those who don’t suffer from an acute, clinical condition, it’s easy to get so caught up in the season’s activities that we feel rushed, like we have to hurry to do… something. So much of this urgency is artificial, just a manipulation of our feelings that’s been imposed from outside ourselves.

                  *                                   *                                *

I wrote about seeing the rabbit in the field on Christmas Day in 1998. Although that scene took place a few days before Christmas, something about it flickered in and out of my consciousness over the next four days, finally compelling me to write it down on Christmas Day. Five years later, it’s still with me. So what’s the deal? It was just a rabbit in a vacant lot. It was close to Christmas; so what?

One obvious aspect is the degree to which human habitats have spread themselves out and how much human habitats exclude every living thing that’s not human. At first, that sounds like a statement of the obvious. The people in the mall neither knew about, nor cared about, that rabbit. As far as most people were concerned, it was just fine that a rabbit lived in that field. On one hand, there was so little left for the rabbit to eat, so few places left for an animal to find shelter from the wind and the worst of the cold. On the other hand, it was an animal so it must be just fine being outside in winter – and perfectly capable of finding food water and shelter even if they weren’t obviously available to me.

To be clear about this: I’m not particularly fond of rabbits. As I understand it, their image as gentle, vulnerable creatures is belied by the fact of their own rather vicious social interactions. I don’t appreciate the damage that they cause the plants in my garden. And without predators or the destruction of habitat, they’d multiply beyond the capacity of the land to sustain their numbers, much like… well, humans.

But on that December night, the rabbit on that bare ground crystallized for me humankind’s utter indifference to anything outside itself. And the result not only diminishes those things that suffer from our indifference, but it diminishes us, as well. It would have been easy to just not notice the rabbit. Trying as hard as I could, I could barely see it as the day’s light faded. Yet we find it too easy to not notice rabbits, birds, raccoons, the unfortunate pets tied up outside in the cold. It’s also too easy to ignore other people who seem too other to be familiar to us, too other to be admitted into the circle of people we have enough energy and emotional capacity left to care about. It’s easy to miss the laborers who produce our Christmas gifts, or only to notice them as people who, because of the low-wage jobs they have, need something from us: health care; housing assistance; or unemployment benefits when their labor is no longer needed. Too often, we just don’t notice things. And it’s that inability to notice that results in our pursuing the wrong things for the wrong reasons in too many aspects of our lives. Christmas is the least of the problem in many ways, yet it’s indicative of the false urgency that propels so many other activities in our lives. And why shouldn’t we be more attentive to the lives of others at Christmas?

Are all the deadlines really that important? Are they really even that necessary? Are our lives that much better from all our running around to work and activities and church, and not noticing that another few square miles of open land have been transformed to a state where only humans – and perhaps the vermin that feed on humans, and human waste – are granted the habitat that they need to live.

                  *                                   *                                *

Five years later, the rabbit’s little patch of field is gone, utterly obliterated. The entire area now is apartments, and garages used by the people who live in them. I work in a different building now, a few miles farther south at the edge of my city’s sprawl, where new fields are rapidly being engulfed by “development.” And so the cycle goes. Fields where plant and animal communities thrive are “developed,” and through the process of development, the land becomes sterile. Ironically, it’s the sterile, dead land that’s considered productive.

Once in a while when I’m driving home, I see a rabbit on a little patch of ground that hasn’t yet been “developed.”

The original draft was written in 1998. I’ve revised and polished it since then, but this piece hasn’t been published before now.

Loss and purpose

Some words in contemporary discourse are used too much and thought about too little. At the same time, I heard that the use of another set of words, words such as kindness and mercy, has been declining since the mid-twentieth century at least. It matters because the words we use indicate the state of our minds, our hearts, and our intentions. Words like spiritual seem to be used a fair amount; describing yourself as “spiritual but not religious” is a common expression. We talk freely about rights, dreams, goals, and describe things—including people—as being out of the mainstream, or even radical.

At the same time, the analysis I referred to shows that words like mercy and responsibility show up with decreasing frequency in published writing and in audio transcriptions over the past 50-70 years.

At the moment, our culture is focused on achievement, on prevailing through the struggles of life, on ultimately winning the contest of life. If there’s a problem with this way of thinking—and I believe there is—it’s that human life is not a contest that needs to be, or even can be, won.

I think artmaking reflects this idea. Win all you want or all you can. In a hundred years, you’ll be just as dead as Julius Caesar, and less than a hundred years from that time, few people, if any, will have any inkling that you ever existed. Furthermore, whether you’re one of life’s great winners or someone who must accept a humbler existence, you will encounter loss as your life unfolds. Ultimately, the only “art” to living is to make of those losses, something that nourishes others.” That quote is from the physician and writer, Rachel Naomi Remen. Dr. Remen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease as a teenager, and wasn’t expected live much beyond her 40th birthday. She devoted a significant portion of her career to teaching students in medical school the value of listening to their patients, as well as attending to their own feelings in response to the losses they suffer through the setbacks and sufferings of their patients.

We are not here to win. Such a statement is all but heresy in the secular theology of a culture based on market capitalism. But we are not, like or not, accept it or not. We are here to live, to give voice to our own astonishment, the words of the great writer, Annie Dillard.

Cultivating a serious practice in art making can help us remain grounded, can keep us focused on what sustains and enlarges life, and can help us avoid being taken in by the shallow and ephemeral nature of consumer culture. Yet the way forward in the practice of making art might be experienced as an exercise in frustration and failure more than a way toward peaceful fulfillment of our creativity. And if you approach other careers in that same spirit, I believe the statement still holds that you’re likely to experience periods of giving a lot of effort to gain a result that might not have been what you sought or intended.

But we’re not called to win, to have everything go right, or even to struggle and achieve some measure of success, even it’s intermittent. The call of life, of vocation, of truth is the call to keep pushing forward, even when we can’t see the way. The call to make art, or better, live our lives in an artful way regardless of whether our work is considered “artistic” is to find a worthwhile direction and begin the journey in that direction, but then to keep going even when the path is dark and outcome uncertain.

The reward or the reward for the effort, for the sacrifice, the payoff, is integrity, a life that can hold our own respect years from now, when the current culture of today has morphed into something else, and possibly left us behind.

Art as transaction

The dancer and choreographer, Twyla Tharp, got me thinking about the relationship between artists and their audience members with an interesting thought that she presented in her book, The Creative Habit:

Everyone who presents his or her work to the public eventually realizes that there’s a quasi-legal transaction between artist and audience… You feel gypped when the [artist] breaks the contract.

There’s certainly something to that. A humorist is supposed to make you laugh. A mystery writer is supposed to build a murderous maze and then lead you out of it. A musician sets a mood and then within that mood creates and resolves tension. A choreographer presents bodies moving through space. On one level, the dancers defy the physical limitations of an average human, as well as the restrictions of gravity. The dance itself also defies the chaotic, often random nature of moving objects. But on another level, the choreographer and dancers connect the audience to universal emotions and ancestral impulses.

And a photographer… does… selfies?

Just kidding.

We do similar stuff. The pictures that move me the most connect me to landscapes, they awaken memories, maybe deep memories, and they evoke emotions and awaken those same ancestral impulses that Ms. Tharp referred to.

Yet to take any single point of view, any one breakdown of an artistic performance or piece of work and conclude that that’s the one, that that’s what art is, misses the relational nature of art. And in that misunderstanding, we set aside the capacity for change, for growth, for the opportunity to deepen our appreciation of ourselves, our fellow travelers on the journey through life, and for a richer apprehension of the wonder of it all.

Maybe what we’re ultimately seeking in our work, and in our interaction with artwork that speaks most clearly to each of us, is less a transaction than a conversation.

A transaction includes an element of choice—I’d like this one over here, not that one over there—and we offer some form of compensation, whether it’s currency for a shirt or a bag of potatoes; time, as well as money, for a movie, concert or play; or devoting our time and attention to visual art. But with all due acknowledgement to post-sale marketing and the ongoing relationship we have with many of the products and services we buy, the transaction itself happens once, and then it’s over.

When art resonates with an audience member, he or she can return to it again and again. In fact, when art works really well for someone, the work itself seems to come back to that person. When this happens, the work seems like it’s gotten under our skin, or like we can’t get it out of our head. We notice things we hadn’t seen or heard before, or we go back to parts of the work that we noticed earlier, but that hold more significance for us now. When this happens, at least for me, it can seem that piece of art that I’m responding to changes, revealing more, or deeper, meaning over time. But it’s we, the audience, who change. We become different people, people who have changed through our experience of life, as we learn more, as we absorb the pain of our own struggles and defeats, the joys of our successes and victories, and the poignant realization of the inevitable connection between victory and defeat. We change as we experience success and failure, and as we gain a deeper realization of the fact of our own aliveness, even as we age and grow closer to our death.

This isn’t sad or depressing. As we mature I think we realize satisfaction that’s tinged with myriad memories, perceptions and emotions. It’s not the shallow sense of “Wow, life keeps getting better and better!!!” Rather, it’s the understanding that life is hard, and beautiful, and surprising, and wondrous, and worth every moment of struggle. That realization can continue to unfold for us throughout our life, and a relationship with artwork, an ongoing conversation with it, can enhance it.

Verbal descriptions of visual art

Today’s thought experiment is that if you can accurately and thoroughly describe a piece of visual art, a photography, a painting, a sketch or drawing or the like, that piece of artwork has failed at some level as art.

Understanding where that come came from begins through stating the obvious: we comprehend, we take in, visual art through our sense of vision. It we approach a statement in our painting or photography that defies verbal description that work more likely adheres to its medium.

Photographers has used terms like simplicity, mystery, beauty, light, color and gesture to articulate what they’re trying to convey through visual depiction of line, shape, texture, color and the rest. A term like mystery might clear enough in that it’s expressing something that resists simply, unambiguous description. A term like gesture, when applied to visual imagery, can be confusing to a general audience who thinks of term as a bodily movement that affirms or emphasizes, or maybe precludes, a spoken message. But the average person doesn’t typically associate gesture as an element of an image, or as the defining feature of the subject of an image. Yet it’s that very characteristic—inarguably there, and at the same time, very difficult to pin down—that makes it so effective.

When a subject is as obvious as a hillside covered with foliage in its brilliant fall color scheme of reds and golds, with a still lake in the foreground and old, weathered rowboat sitting in the lake, reflecting in the still water, there’s not a lot of mystery there. Even the gesture is so obvious that it loses what’s compelling about the scene. That’s not to say the scene isn’t beautiful, peaceful, compelling even, as it is. Yet nothing in that image suggests something ambiguous, brings out the mysterious, or raises a question that will engage a viewer in anything beyond the obvious.

The mottled yellow and brown leaf that doesn’t look like much as you walk past it gives a photographer or painter material to work with. If you can find the gesture in that subject that stops someone and compels them to look again, you do the work of an artist, and you’ve succeeded in a more challenging task than capture a pretty picture.

Stopping the voice—by letting it speak

I'm reading a book called The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer, which I haven't finished. In fact, I'm less than halfway through it. But Singer began by describing the voice that each of us has, the internal voice that represents our consciousness to ourselves. It observes where we are, and what's happening to us and around us. It also provides commentary on all of that from inside ourselves. The voice often criticize us, as well as others, and frequently tells us what we should or should not do. It's strikingly wrong an appalling amount of the time. 

Michael Singer is hardly the first person to have noticed this voice, this aspect of ourselves. It's what some writers have called the internal editor, or internal critic. It's what the writer Steven Pressfield calls resistance. It's the thing we have to learn to ignore if we ever do anything significant, that is, if we ever set the judgment and criticism of the rest of the world aside and do what matters to us. We might fail, but probably we won't fail completely. What's more likely is that the extent of our success will be less than we hoped for or simply different from what we envisioned for ourselves. That probably has more to do with a flaw in our expectations, than with our ability to do whatever we set out to do.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the voice is that it doesn't stop. If we're mentally and emotionally healthy, we have enough ability to turn our attention away from the voice's chatter and focus on something else for at least a little while. When we can't attend to anything else, when our thoughts loop through the same perceptions and commentary and conclusions over and over, we are in some form of mental impairment, or at the most extreme, mental illness. Yet behind the voice is another presence, another consciousness that can separate itself from the voice and what it's saying. That presence is more who we are. That identity, when you strip away all the labels seems simpler than we usually think of ourselves. I am a husband, father, brother, son, uncle, nephew, writer, photographer, and on and on. But those are labels and roles that I’ve accepted or that society has tacked onto me. Beneath all that, who or what am I? Singer explores that in his book. The salient point here is that our core selves can look at the voice with a degree of separation that we don't take advantage of most of the time.

But we can take advantage of it. If we can't make the voice be quiet, we also don't have to allow it to dominate our consciousness attention. Instead, we can take a figurative step back and just observe what that voice pays attention to, what it says, and how it says it. We don't have to react and in not reacting, we can open ourselves to much more of the reality swirling around us than the voice attends to. And it's less stressful for ourselves and others when we do that.

Increasingly, this approach is essential to me when I'm photographing. By this point in my career as a photographer, I have photographed enough, and maybe in enough places, that I have a collection of shots. More and more, I'm drawn to things that aren't the shot, the grand vista, dramatic view, or as a recent ad for a Photoshop tutorial put it, "the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, eye-popping" image. So much of life is hyperbolic, attempting to live at 115 percent of capacity, lighting both ends of the candle with blowtorches, as loud and as fast as unreasonably possible. Yet sooner or later, we all end up in the same place. I wonder whether in trying so hard to make a huge impact, we in fact miss many, maybe most of the gifts that are offered to us along the way. In terms of image making, a lot of the most interesting images, the ones that remain interesting over time, usually aren't the most dramatic, eye-popping, jaw-breaking, concussion-producing pictures. The most interesting images—regardless of whether we photograph them—arise from little moments of presence that occur throughout a day. They're moments that keep me going more than all the stuff that's too bright, too loud, too enthusiastic, and too in-my-face.

I realize that the approach I'm defining might be limiting my audience—but that in itself brings up a subject for another blog post: who is the audience for photography. Still what matters more at this point than a huge audience for grandiloquent imagery is producing work that's more authentic for me and that connects with people who respond to the moment of awareness that I experienced when I made the photograph. To the extent that I can do that, I'll achieve a type of success that's deeper than metrics might suggest.

Vision in photography, Part 2

Most of us who come alive when seeing good artwork, especially when making it ourselves, appreciate unique styles, genuine statements that are consistent throughout an artist's body of work. Writers might refer to this consistency as style, or maybe voice. For musicians, the term might be sound. You recognize guitarist, Larry Carlton's, playing because he has a unique sound. Photographers use the term vision to describe a quality of their work that defines each photographer. 

Still, I've found it a bit vexing to try to settle on a description of the concept that’s clear and definite. Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart expressed the challenge as he sought to define the term, obscenity. Maybe I can't define it absolutely, Stewart said, but I know it when I see it. (Not sure that’s a direct quotation, but it captures the judge's intention.)
Vision is more than the most effective or efficient way of seeing. It includes effective composition, but beyond that, it's something unique to each photographer. Vision can't be taught or transferred from one person to another. It's discovered, and then developed and refined. 

Our vision encapsulates what or maybe how we respond subject matter. It necessarily includes the subject matter that most resonates with us as individuals. It determines what we perceive to be of value in a photograph, what we understand to be worth showing. 
Our ability to recognize and develop our vision is what will enable us to be successful in our art making. And in turn, understanding or recognizing vision in an artist's work can allow us or enable us to respect his work, even if the work isn't consistent with our personal tastes and aesthetics. 

The greatest photographers, the icons, were people who recognized and cultivated extraordinary vision. They include people such as Dorothea Lange, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, and many others. Charles Cramer, Cole Thompson and Chuck Kimmerle are artists who are currently working who have extraordinary vision.

Vision is the thing that as photographers we must be true to. Or loyal to. Or faithful or consistent. And it's tough because we don't always know how the next twist or turn in our creative development will unfold. And sometimes we grow by taking steps that don't work out so we can learn from the experience, take a step back and try again. But while I believe the preceding sentence to be true, it’s also the case that our work might develop in ways that aren’t popular with our audience. Bob Dylan has been booed off the stage more than once in his career. But playing electric guitar wasn’t a “wrong” direction for him, even if his audience didn’t appreciate it at first. Or at all! So we need to be patient with the process as it unfolds. And we need to trust that if we're as honest and faithful to our work as we have the strength to be, our efforts will be validated in the end. 
 

Looking for Vision – Part 1

The term vision comes up a lot in photography, which probably sounds like stating the obvious. Still, as ubiquitous as it is, the concept isn't necessarily clear. So I wanted to explore the concept a bit, which led to the following thoughts about vision as it might be applied in critiques, reviews, analysis of photographs. I'll follow it in another, shorter, post that takes on the concept of vision more directly.

Not long after I tried approach making photographs seriously, another photographer offered some feedback on one of my pictures. The substance of the comments isn't important here. What's telling is that he finished his feedback by saying that his comments were just his opinion and that my vision might be different (my emphasis). The comment left me feeling uncomfortable, although it took some time and thought before I could articulate why it bothered me.

If there's a problem with the photograph, I wanted to know what it was. Clearly speaker had an issue with one or more things in the picture and his comments were probably along the lines of what most people who understand the medium would have said. So why not just point out the problem? Backing away from the criticism after stating it suggested that an unspoken message behind the critique: "I think your picture is flawed, but maybe that's just me. Maybe your vision is different; maybe you like pictures that suck." To be fair, that's almost certainly not what the commentator really wanted to communicate. But it would have been better to state the problem, and then stop. The disclaimer wasn't necessary or helpful.

So after some thought, I concluded that two problems exist in critiques of artwork in general, and that especially seem to accompany critiques of photography by photographers who haven't had any guidance in how to analyze pictures.

First is the all but irresistible urge to say whether or not you like a photograph. Second is the tendency to view photographs from the standpoint of expectations, rather than evaluation.

That any of us likes a painting, photograph, or any other piece of artwork is subjective and unreliable as a guide to the quality of work, the market value of the work, or its importance within the medium or genre that it belongs to. Most of us might reasonably hope that our tastes change and become more refined and sophisticated as we learn more about what goes into making art, the history of the medium, and how any given piece fits into the overall body of work in that area. Many of us liked macaroni and cheese and hot dogs when we're 10 years old. By the time we made it to 40 or 50 years old, our tastes in food have often matured, become more sophisticated, and changed for the better. The same can be said for artwork. So liking a piece of artwork doesn't tell us much and doesn't give the artist much useful guidance unless it results in a sale.

A better approach involves stepping back from likes and dislikes, and paying more attention to what we actually see, and then learning to describe what we see. This is easier than we might expect. In fact, it's an easier approach to viewing artwork than trying to make sophisticated appraisal that most of us aren't sophisticated or practiced enough to make. But no evaluation can hold any value without an understanding of what the object of the appraisal actually is. The description can note the general subject of the work (landscape, portraiture, etc.), the specific subject in a specific picture (a landscape photograph of Niagara Falls), what is or isn't in focus, the background or foreground and their relationship to the main subject, the exposure and so on. If this sounds like basic stuff, it is. And that's what the starting point should be.

The next step might consider whether the work fits our expectations and if it doesn't, we can consider whether or not it's appropriate to loosen or broaden our expectations. Art moves forward when it goes beyond expectations and still makes an effective statement. It works best when it incorporates or delivers beauty in the process.

We can be tripped up by being too sophisticated for the intended function of the work. Not every piece of art needs to make a complex statement, much less series of statements or risk being inconsequential. We don't, as viewers and consumers of artwork, need to push beyond our honest reactions to the work. But the reaction will be clearer and will have more value to the artist if it's grounded on what the work is. So beginning an evaluation with a focus on description will be more informative and useful than saying what we like or getting to carried away with involved interpretation.

Moreover, keeping our initial evaluation to a description of the work opens us to the possibility of seeing and appreciating work that is unique, that carries an artist's personal vision rather than rehashing what someone else has already done. It allows us, as viewers and consumers of the work, to be open to unexpected gifts that the work might offer us as viewers.

In the next post, I'll get back to the theme that I originally wanted to explore: vision.