There are ideas and theories that an educated person can reproduce with fidelity that nevertheless have no real purchase on the mind for a long time. I’ve been able to justify and explain abstract visual art for decades but I have to confess that somewhere in the back of my head was the same thought uttered by generations of irritated grandparents: “what’s the big deal? I know kids that do that”.
A point not lost on many modern artists, who were in fact taken by the art that children make, with many trying to work up from that foundation rather than from traditions that assumed representational art was the only goal.
Photography is at least some small part of the story of how other visual artists tried to move on, and many photographers have been eager to follow that lead despite—or perhaps because—of the assumption that they were condemned to mimetic reproductions of the world as we see it. We may be on the edge of human viewers having to finally shed their lingering presumption that when they look at a photograph, they see reality. If you couldn’t learn that just by considering what was outside Matthew Brady’s frame in his Civil War photographs—and how he might have staged what was inside of it—you might finally grasp the point the first time a sophisticated generative AI image portrays you in a photorealistic image visiting the North Pole or in a cell at Sing-Sing, despite your lack of having ever been to either place.
Be that as it may, making art, even with my auto-didactic mediocrity, made abstraction of various kinds meaningful to me in new ways. The theories suddenly had a visceral clarity.
So last week, walking home through a campus building, the long winter sun’s light on the walls suddenly struck me and I set up this shot with my cameraphone:
As abstractions go, not so abstract. Nor the exact perfect time—I think maybe ten minutes earlier or later (not sure which, but I think earlier) to get a bit more separation on the shadow off the lower two objects. But the lines and the texture of the wall really grabbed me on seeing and I think they make it into this photo.