my reading today brought up avant garde very very briefly. for those of you who don't know, avant garde is the pushing of cultural norms, most commonly within art. so what made me go hum, was that orginally, vincent van gough's work was once considered avant garde. i never would have guessed cause his work seems... peaceful almost, i think. i knew he wasn't appreciated during his time, but... van gough- avant garde? anyone one else a little shocked by that?
our teacher mentioned today that early photography wasn't accepted as REAL art. real art took time and skill- photography didn't. i think photography back then had to be much more difficult than it is now. they didn't have little dials on their camera telling them what the best aperture would be based on the light. they weren't able to take pictures at 1/1000 of a second. early early photography must have been so challenging.
this is kind of how i feel about digital photography (for the very very most part). i think there's too many people who use a digital camera and know how to do nothing in a dark room and call themselves a photographer. with digital it's so easy to just set it to automatic and not have to do ANY work besides pushing a button. i suppose this is true for taking 35mm pictures too (my camera only has manual settings, so i've never done this and forget about it). someone in my high school photo class carried a digital camera around all the time and took pictures of every single and random object imaginable (i assume her logic behind this is that if you have 3,000 photographs a few are bound to be good). what really ticked me off though was that she took a picture with a digital picture, sent off somewhere online for it to be printed, had our teacher matt it for her, and got a gold star in scholastics for it. she's majoring in photography and never bothered learning to do things properly in a dark room.
i'm not bashing digital completely. i get it; i believe it can aid photography. i just think people use it as a crutch too much. and it makes me sad that it's replacing traditional photography.
i was going to mention henri cartier bresson here cause for some reason i thought he was taking pictures in the early 1900s (making him one of the early photographers). buuut. this isn't true cause he was born in 1908, haha. i'll mention him anyways cause he's super cool. he used 50mm film for a majority of his pictures and was one of the first street photographers. one of my high school teachers told me that he never used any filters or dodging and burning, that he only printed "perfect" photographs (i dunno if this is true, haha. that teacher said quite a few things that weren't unfortunatly).
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