'I'm always photographing everything as practice.' - Minor White
Just as a painter is always sketching, the subject matter being largely irrelevant as sketching is as much about looking as picture making, it seems that a photographer can sketch with their camera. I've just read
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney which stresses that his art is all about seeing. Hockney is somewhat disparaging about photography, although he uses cameras to make pictures himself. It is the single-eyed vision he most objects to. But also the lack of one of the three elements he says the Chinese deem essential to be involved in the making of paintings - the hand, the eye, and the heart.
What I feel he fails to understand is that picture making with a camera is not the same thing at all as picture making with the hand. It makes a different sort of picture. Pictures that are not intended to be looked at in the same way, or to convey the same meanings which paintings are capable of conveying. Photographs are literal, paintings are metaphorical. Photographs say "I saw this", paintings say "I experienced seeing this". This is, undoubtedly a simplification, but is the essence of the difference. For all that, photographs can have mystery and bear lengthy contemplation.
Anyway, I have been photographing things for practice, partly to familiarise myself with my new toy, but also because I do it anyway. No matter how often you tread the same path, or sit in the same wall, things are in constant flux. If you look. This is something Hockney talks about in relation to landscape changing with the seasons, but I find it applies just as much in the home as the light through the windows changes.
I suppose it depends how you look at the world, but I can find things that interest me visually anywhere. Influenced by reading Hockney's views on how we don't look ta things from a fixed point - the essence of early cubism, and by the fact that photographers frame and re-frame shots (even if not making an exposure with each re-framing) I wondered if a more truthful way of showing photographs is to show the ultimately chosen composition alongside the rejected ones. Fruit have long been a favourite subject for still life painting. Photographers often approach subjects by trying to idealise them in an attempt to make them timeless. But look at still life painting throughout history and it reflects the time it was painted. So why not include the electric socket and plugs?
