On Photography


Touching Beauty

 

Art is not what we see, but what we don't, hence invisible. It is not even the subject, or what may lie before the camera, but what exists in the imagination. This is what Adams called pre-visualization, or Henri's state, -an association in memory, art is the making of the invisible known.

The sense of morning sunlight on the dance, the emotion of a color, the rhythm of form echoing the order and harmony of the cosmos, Art is the voice of the ineffable.

Is it then any wonder then that artists are drawn in an especial way to the form of the body, the manifestation if the invisible, that which we see daily and mediates our every experience and references our every activity?

There are many many manifestations of love, and beauty, and form. There is a beauty in photography we've grasped but never quite held. (There is nothing closer to that sense of beauty than figurative art photography. Yeah; I love trees and landscapes, rural and coastal scenes, flowers and mountains, but the poetic human element is incomparable, in which all things are contained, summed completed experienced.) We all live in the mediation of mind and art. Harmony is the distant horizon, and it is the artists job to find something of that unapproachable vision now. That's the struggle.

Ansel Adams once said:"The subject is absolutely secondary (as it is in most painting and in most painting exhibitions). The subject is, really, the very personal possession of the artist" We need look at creation but mustn't stop there. We must needs look unto it. We need not just look to see, rather, as artists, more for what we might see. Everything is employed to that end.



© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan Photography




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