The description below of a life without belief was written by the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)in 1910, before this even worse neoliberal from of capitalism scratched away at our precious private lives and convinced us to exchange our souls for stuff.
Kandinsky wrote “Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideals. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.”
(from “CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL in Art” by Wassily Kandinsky)
In the midst of this I am still asking
‘WHAT IS THERE TO PHOTOGRAPH?’
WHAT IS ITS MEANING?
FOR WHOM IS IT MADE?
History has shown that Primitive Italian artists of the pre-Renaissance, like the Primitive Greeks, their predecessors and in turn, their predecessors, the Egyptians, sought to express their inner poetic feelings rather than the outer reality defined by their ruler/patron’s needs to convince the weak and poor via their cultural propaganda .to continue to bow down.
This struggle is actually between realism* and a mystical ignorance-serving spiritualism, between humanism and Barbarism -as in Trump and his servants. The art which the rich and powerful want continually insists upon a decorative, empty-eyed god blessed vacuity rather than the beauty finally recognised and revealed by the humanist artists da Vinci, (1452-1519) Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Raffaello.(1483-1520)
It was known, even in the Renaissance, that the ruling forces created and still create a battle between conventional conservative social restrictions and artist’s inner souls.
In this time of crisis, as one system of rulership is being displaced by another system of rulers, what is there to photograph, to paint or sculpt, to write a poem or a story about? Why would I choose xyz rather than abc?
When I was still a teen and looking continually at photographer’s images I came across Edward Weston’s sinuous if not to say sexual still-life images. They gave me another way to look at the world. Then I came across a close-up of a cabbage leaf by Weston.
The picture stunned me because the leaf itself was flawed and not inherently beautiful yet the photograph is. The light glowing off of the receding ribs, the composition of the leaf running towards the camera, the gloomy sensuous tones compelled me to return to it over and over in my life. Quietly, to myself, I could only say, ‘this is very beautiful’.
In this discovery Weston showed me that from then on in my life there was to be
an understanding that the outside observable world was simply the raw material for what my camera and I would make it appear as something transformed by my skills and imagination…I would impose upon the reality to create a more emotional, more intense, more truthful image of the reality…and in that, his cabbage leaf turned me into becoming an artist. I forever thank Edward Weston for that.
Weston granted me hope and aspirations – intellectual and emotional gifts of art, that provided possibilities for a transformation of character in what is otherwise, at least in too many parts of the Anglo/American world, a wilderness of people who not only have no hope but also have no hope of having hope.
EDWARD WESTON’S photographs and writing taught me that the world was a richer place than my cultural background suggested it could be. That through culture, the arts, beauty, knowledge and visual literacy I could discover a way of seeing and looking at the world and a way of conditioning my life; that love for our beautiful earth and for people could be richly expressed in the medium and that anything less than that was not good enough.
notes*poetic realism accounts for two realities; one of using the clarity of critical thought to objectively appraise the world of people and a second of engaging that world with one’s subjective sensebilties, and one’s most profound concerns for truth and beauty. That is where the poetry is found.
** naturalism is a single dimensional view and rendering of the world as it appears rather than what it truly is, a complex mix of outer and inner reality.
You can see more of my stills and films on y website: www.robertgoldenpictures.com
and on TOPFOTO: https://www.topfoto.co.uk/contributors/robert-golden/
and coming soon is PHOTOGRAPHY:Making Meaning