I read this interview with my friend, Dennis Darling, and I decided to take the rest of the day off. Dennis is a tenured photography professor at UT Austin. He is also brilliant, pithy, and eccentric. All the good trappings of an artist. Read the interview and gnash your teeth or praise him. I'm going out for some BBQ and then taking a nap on the couch. Dennis already said everything I wanted to say today....
http://www.ilovetexasphoto.com/dennis-darling/
http://www.ilovetexasphoto.com/dennis-darling/
11 comments:
Thank you !
My best regards from Romania!
Have a great weekend and a tasty BBQ!
Great article. Fascinating guy. I really like those panoramic portraits and the way they put the human subject into context.
Dennis Darling is atypical and fascinating. He works only for himself as an artist. Trying to find his work on the web is difficult. He wrote a book a long time again called, Chameleon with a Camera. It was a small book about how to work out in the world, out on the road, with just two cameras and a couple of lenses, a small bag of film and a few changes of clothes. So different from today. I've read that book so many times the pages are falling apart.... I should get a couple more from the boxes he says he has in his garage.
Curiosity.
Depending on which circles you frequent, today it's all about the stuff and almost less about the image. I recently dropped two of my lighting students because of just too much bullshit. It's why this statement hit home for me:
"[The] trophy generation wants everything handed to them. “Can you tell me who to contact?” Instead of going out and making contacts themselves."
The guys I dropped - they wanted ALL of the magic settings instead of thinking. And for one commercial shoot I did, they wanted to know all of the intricacies of how I got the job. It doesn't work quite that way. The job was had because of years or referrals and networking, not because I posted some magic photo on Flickr.
I took the day off and baked pies yesterday.
Pies are good.
This is a really good interview. Regarding photography, I can relate to two points he makes. One, he questions why so many of us take many more photos than we need to or should. I have noticed that if I take twenty or thirty digital photos of a subject my favorite shot will likely be one of the first two or three. Two, he says that art is about the journey, not the destination. I'm not sure if this is a good analogy, but I recently took a long walk, intending to photographing something specific at a specific destination. But my favorite shot of the morning was taken about a third of the way to that destination, and is completely different from what I had set out to shoot. So be it.
Thanks for sharing the link to this interview.
Thanks for the reference to the book Kirk. I went to Amazon and had to buy a used copy. Would have preferred to buy new so the author could make some $$$.
Fantastic read.
This is the same problem in 'groups' ... everyone wants things spoonfed and really can't figure out why others react the way they do...
Wow! That was a long read, but once I got started, I couldn't stop. Very insightful, and wise!
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