Saturday, August 8, 2009

Rabble rabble rabble

Okay, so, where did we leave off last time?

I survived last semester... sort of. Details aside, I miraculously survived Design II thanks to my ridiculous stop-motion project (and maybe the sweet mercy of my teaching assistant, but I might be wrong). I stayed in Denton over the summer to get ahead on some of my classes, so I took Art Survey I and did really well; now I'm taking Figure Drawing, and it's taken me almost to the end of the class to unlearn how I've drawn years before, but how little I've changed is actually liberating and not as dull and plain-looking as I used to draw. Hopefully I get a decent grade by the end of it.

Also, I'm finally about to start the photo classes and the photography class is mainly digital, so I have to get a new digital SLR; which is GREAT and would be greater if only I could make up my damn mind about which one I wanna get - or rather, if only I had enough money to get a camera in the kick-ass spectrum and not the bare minimum range, but now I have a job and if things sort themselves out I might get a D90 or a D300 by the end of the year (hopefully). Or a D60, prior to that. I really want something that lets me shoot HD video, and those are great candidates, aside from just being great DSLRs. I'd like to make movies. Kinda like Michael Bay movies, only worth sitting down for plot and not the super-expensive special effects; now if I can get started on creating stories...

Now, in the subject of photograhy, I've been doing a bit of thinking, particularly after something I agreed on with my drawing teacher; he was talking about the "dangers" of having art that one created being regarded more for how "pretty" it might be and not for the message it tries to send. I also remember someone in one of those tight-knit internet communities that I go to, who said that photography was the lowest form of art because it usually fails to find meaning. Mind you, I find the guy to be a dick and most likely a troll, but after seeing a lot of pictures (and thanks to the internet, a lot of pictures really is A LOT) and the advent of digital photography, most photography still is portraiture and landscaping, he's (mostly) right! And it sucks. It sucks because digital photography has so much potential, and yet a lot of it ends up being the same old thing.

Anyway, I'm mostly just rambling, and this all has been said before for sure, and surely there's photographers out there trying to do something else, but I know from this point that whatever it is I end up doing has to go beyond the point of being just aesthetic, and possibly beyond the personal, too; I want to make art that communicates more than just "pretty" no matter how much it confuses or enrages people. I just want to say I'm mostly done with capturing the common and wanting to do something more. Just as, I'm sure, other photo artists (and other artists) have thought before me. Rabble rabble rabble.

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