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| Re: Does Size Matter? [message #949 is a reply to message #114 ] |
Thu, 26 May 2005 19:54   |
 Meyer, Salvelio
Messages: 4
Registered: April 2005 |
Junior Member |
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11:58am Jan 18, 2004
After reading the January editorial, "Does size matter", a conversation I had, a few days ago, with a good friend who is a lecturer at the Port Elizabeth Technikon (South Africa), came to mind.
Our conversation revolved around our local art museum, the "Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum". The only thing that has really changed in the museum' s history is its name, and that happened last year, to keep up with the name changes taking place all over South Africa. For the rest, the exhibitions and happenings in the museum over the past years have been contrived, self-indulgent and have not really reached out to a wider public.
A few weeks ago I had to take a couple of photographs for a friend who was exhibiting her work in a joint exhibition called "Changes". The exhibition was made up of paintings, sculptures and photographs that depicted the changes in South Africa over the past few years.
As I walked into the museum I was faced with a jumble of lifeless objects hanging from the wall and laid out on the floor. Many of them were rehashed ideas of things done so many times before. Some tried to shock, others tried to protest, and I was left with a feeling of great anxiety when I realized that the "art world" is in crisis.
Speaking from a photographic point of view, the two photographs that formed part of the exhibition, seemed like objects filling a blank space on a wall, and did not reflect the true changes taking place in the world of photography. Some curators believe that black and white prints created a few decades ago are now true pieces of art and many reject the notion that digital prints or any images created in a digital environment have any ÒartisticÓ value.
These same people, as Pedro states, are using the Internet to correspond and as a research tool, but to them that is as far as it goes. The notion of art being created with new technologies is just too far fetched.
After having being introduced to the world of digital photography by my friend Pedro a few years ago, I now realize that the only limits a photographer really has, is a lack of creativity and the unwillingness to set his mind free of the limitations of traditional photography. We are now at a point where we can say that film is a species on the brink of extinction.
Photography has become an experience of sounds and images that can draw a viewer in and give them a virtual experience like never before. What does size matter, if you can travel with the photographer within a virtual realm?
I dream of my images becoming holograms, allowing the viewer to walk into my world and experience what I saw and heard the moment I clicked the shutter.
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| On Size [message #950 is a reply to message #114 ] |
Thu, 26 May 2005 19:58 |
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1:45am May 13, 2004
I was interested to read Pedro Meyer's commentary on my short essay 'Does Size Matter?'. Of course, the humorous sexual reference was intended and clear, as the last line of the essay indicated. However Mr Meyer's major criticism was that my essay did not discuss the shifts in scale that occur when photographs are reproduced on the internet. Of course, images reproduced on the internet are no longer photographs (even if they could continue to be called photographic) and the same might be said for photo-mechanical billboard images. I have in fact discussed this issue at length in various published essays. But this particular essay was stressing the need for historians to attend to the physical realities of the photographs they talk about, including their size (and it referred not only to museum artists like Gursky and Avedon and studio photographers like Keita, but also to vernacular objects like photo-lockets that are more often found in the home or the hand). So Mr Meyer's criticisms actually fall outside its boundaries. However it sounds like we could have some productive debates about whether there are any distinctions between photographs and images on the internet.
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Does Size Matter?
