One of the more bizarre things that occurred in the past but that still persists is the phrase “art and photography” . For simplicity’s sake, I‘ll place that statement at the beginning of a historical narrative of culture. It refers to the point where, unlike today, photography was new and not recognized as a possible form of art. From there we fast forward, through the cultural battle to have photography recognized as a possible form of art, then speed further on to the ba

Oakland, CA – The Black Lives Matter movement brought Oakland back into the political foreground in a way not felt since the Women’s March and before that, Occupy. But the granddaddy of them all was the Black Panther Party activism born and bred in Oakland. Only recently has the tremendous role of artwork in that movement been receiving its due attention. But the urgency of the current BLM activism makes newer works the full focus of attention, daily, in the same way. ·

Contents: READING THE IMAGE. THE WORK DONE IN THE IMAGE. THE WORK DONE BY THE IMAGE. DESIGNING THE IMAGE. THE VIEWER AT WORK. THE WORK OF VIEWING. THE WORK BEYOND THE MAKING. THE MAKER’S MOTIVE. MEDIATING THE IMAGE. RECOMMENDED READING. We all want to understand the “meaning” of art, but telling someone how to arrive at that understanding is about as easy as telling someone how to understand the meaning of clouds. My concern with this is to be able to embrace both the “insti

Why do we think that we can know with confidence when something is or is not an "art" work? What is the unifying idea underlying our belief? And what if we see something that we decide is not art -- what other meaningful experience do we expect from the way it presents visual stimulation? Those questions lead me to one special question above all: how does a photograph, my primary medium, design its content such that its content designs the experience of seeing it? I. I've bee

Why do we bother to refer to certain photographs as "still" pictures when the individual picture is by definition a stationary object? I. For me and my contemporaries as young persons, television, more than any other single thing, framed the way photography entered our regular lives. What we understood, without need for explanation, was that a camera saw things and that something "remembered" what it saw long enough to show it to us at a different time. We didn't need to kno

The popular allure of street photography rarely wanes, regardless of time or place. Much of its power to influence audiences rides on the ability to take it for granted that it will show us something we either want to see or need to see, without our having to be there. But it is equally powerful as a means of getting us to see where we are, in a different way. This is inescapably the most dominant factor of street photography’s success: offered without a script, it is a natu

Elitism in art is the enemy of my thinking, doing, and holding of art. It tries in advance to dictate what matters. We don't allow that here