I get the feeling that the concept came after the creation with this set.
Don't get me wrong. I love experimental and challenging photography / art, but the concept needs to be strong and fluent enough to be carried across without the need for explanation.
To me, its as if you have done some light painting, looked back at the images and said to yourself "ooh that looks like a skull, ooh an old man" just like you can with clouds. And then built the concept around the images. This method adds no more weight to the images than what weight they hold themselves and subsequently renders the concept and the images too bitter to swallow.
Well, you're
almost right there Simon and nowhere here have I suggested otherwise
. The fact is, that I was getting really tired of
my 'static photography' and the limitations imposed by it (unless we were to get into the realms of Photoshopping things to the point of being unrecognisable
), so I applied some lateral thinking to the problem
.
The 'concept', if that's not too pretentious a term for my experiment :shrug:, was to choose a complex light source (with more form and texture than, say, a light bulb) and see what kind of images I could produce by manipulating the camera during a single exposure. I can't say that I've ever really seen anyone else do it, so I didn't know what to expect. Once I'd tried a few and seen the results, I realised that the only thing that I could see in any of them were facial expressions or body parts :|. I
then decided to keep going until I had a range of 'faces', which could represent a human life from start to finish and to a very small extent,
learnt how to move the camera to get closer to producing a 'face' (although it took hundreds of clicks to come up with these few). So, there
was a specific intent behind it, but only once I'd tried it and seen how relatively hard it was to produce more 'refined' looking images than the simple shapes that I was getting :shrug:.
What excited me about this experiment, was the simple fact that I was creating (which I think is a fair description) something which couldn't otherwise exist in reality, or (most likely) ever be exactly replicated. A lot of modern, abstract art has this quality as well. For this reason, I decided to 'test the water' and see what the 'creative' part of the TP forum thought - that was all
.
Honestly, I find it quite amusing that my wordless OP has excited much 'heated debate' here
. These are, by my own admission, some of the very
worst photographs that I've ever taken and (frankly) some of the worst that I've seen (from the point of view of content) and yet I've had more views and posts in this thread for anything else I've ever done
! I suppose that it just goes to show what a 'sensational' title can do to attract attention.
Ultimately though, I just saw these shots as being something in the vein of, say, 'smoke painting' (which are pretty well covered on this part of the forum). Of course, nobody accuses the people who create
those photos (where there is obviously no prospect of the photographer knowing what shape he/she is going to get) of being 'pretentious' when they name their photos ('The Dancer', 'The Crucifixtion', 'Buddha on a Bicycle' etc.)
.
Anyway, everyone's entitled to their opinions and plenty of people here have 'called a spade, a spade'
. Let's leave it at that.