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Mirek Elsner wrote:
Most people are left OR right.
I disagree ... most people favor left or right, with a few being equally balanced between them. But most people have the capacity to use and/or develop both left or right to varying degrees. It is certainly easier and more natural to use your dominant side, but when people stop trying to develop (limits I know) and use their "less dominant" side, then they have left something of themselves on the table, so to speak.
Me, I'm probably 80/20 ... but I still like to stretch my 20 when I can.
Which leads me to my appreciation for this post ...
S Dilworth wrote:
I think there are millions of ‘wannabe Daidos’, as ayler puts it, simply because his photos strike a chord with many people (especially young people). The vast majority of those people resonate with the basic aesthetic of are-bure-bokeh (rough, blurred, and out of focus) rather than any highfaluting philosophy behind it all.
There’s just something very visceral about edgy street scenes full of speed and motion. Printed large enough, the grainy off-kilter photos can be pretty intense to come face-to-face with in a gallery. They induce feelings of displacement, the contradictions of both feeling at home in the anonymous city and feeling rootless, the daily low-level panic of unfulfilled potential and desires, etc. – familiar themes for many people today. Because these themes are still highly relevant today, I think Daido’s appeal will not fade so easily. The art world can do what it wants, but new photographers will always want to emulate this, much as they still want to emulate Ansel Adams and HCB.
That’s what I like about Daido, actually. It’s only as conceptual as you make it. When I first came across his work I liked it at first glance, knowing nothing about it. Only later did I learn that in the sixties there was a short-lived Japanese magazine called Provoke, which pushed this unsettling aesthetic at a time when art critics expected to understand the photographs they looked at. Given the social context (the usual sixties stuff, breakdown of traditional mores, shaking off of postwar austerity, etc.), this magazine and its aesthetic signposted the way for a new generation of Japanese photographers eager for change. They lapped it up....Show more →
Thank you for your explanation ... it helps.
Do you think ...
"The vast majority of those people resonate with the basic aesthetic of are-bure-bokeh (rough, blurred, and out of focus)"
is mostly the byproduct of the social element involved ... akin to grunge music, etc., (which has a following, but may not resonate well with arduously trained classical musicians),
OR
do you think it resonates so strongly because the time, money, effort and learning curve of the technical skills needed to emulate it can be rapidly developed, such that multitudes can readily participate in its emulation (i.e. grass roots) ... unlike other styles or genre's that have a greater reliance on slowly developed technical aspects of our craft.?
I'm inclined to consider that the combination of both drives it. Thus, for those of us who may not feel that kind of social angst, and have already developed an appreciation for the technical elements of our craft, we find it more challenging to initially connect with something we've never seen in person. Possibly as well, "slightly offensive" to the hard work we've put into developing our technical skills, such that we are "put off" by it (maybe even some would say "jealous" of the accolades / attention it has garnered) out of our ignorance of the underlying social elements involved with its resonating popularity.
I think I'm beginning to "get it" ... at least as to an understanding of why/where its strong appeal comes for others. Am I moving any closer, in that regard?
Edited on Dec 07, 2012 at 08:02 AM · View previous versions
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