Reply
Wed 23 Dec, 2009 07:54 pm
A few years ago I started a thread featuring a photograph by a NYTimes associated photographer who took a pic of a roomful of people looking at either a painting or paintings.. I loved that one, and plan to look up that link.
Back in the old days I too used to take photos in museums, easy then as even if there were a rule about flash you could look at the guard, say in italy, and murmur 'senza flash' and be let to photo at peace, most of the time.
I've read about the space around the Mona Lisa raucously full of flashes, which is troubling to me.
I'll show a few of mine, senza flash of course, to get this started, and hope to see your photos.
In my case, of the four photos, one of the people is identifiable, and I hope if she sees this she is pleased instead of annoyed. I'll take the photo down, if annoyed.
Not sure of the legalities of all that - but I mean my photos as marking attachment of people to paintings, not any kind of negative.
Back with another post.
Adds.. my interest is in the mix of people and paintings or sculpture or natural history exhibits.. not so much pristine photos of the art itself.
Girl at the de Young -
have to straighten this one out.. improve focus, and so on
Woman at the Getty
Second Woman at the Getty
New York Metropolitan..
@ossobuco,
What kind of camera are you using? It's a film camera rather then a digital camera right?
@tsarstepan,
The fundamental and defining relationship for the artist is between the art and the viewer. A work of art never to be seen by an audience even of one? How much worth can it really have?!
How long have you been photographing museum goers in this spectator on spectator of a sport?
@tsarstepan,
Yes it was, and the photos weren't out of focus when printed, or not by much. The verticality is fixible if I would get the patience to try on the scanner some more times to straighten. I don't have a focus control yet re getting them online, but I suppose I'll pick up adobe before I get into my mass of photos. My photos will vary - I've approaching thirty years of photos on different subjects with everything from instamatics to nikons (my first nikon being better for my eyes for focus), and with eyes varying back and forth in acuity just as my judgement was improving. Plus I'm still learning how to scan on this machine. Size seems to change between home, office, and professional. What?
I have a canon scanner I used to like, I may need to drag it out of the closet - this one is just part of the printer.
But... given the flaws, I am always pulled to watch people and art.
@tsarstepan,
I don't know how long.. probably since I got the oldie nikon in the early eighties - that was when I had been in land arch school and was blown awake about my surroundings.. but I wasn't centered on just that. And some photos are just in my mind.
On the art and value without a viewer question, I'm not sure.
Just because noone else sees it doesn't mean it is not of interest.
Interest and worth, are you talking money?
@ossobuco,
I for one appreciate your effort to document this important relationship (viewer and art).
@ossobuco,
Not literal monetary value but more on the lines of cultural and societal value.
If one took a one of a kind
Van Gogh painting and buried it in the foundation of a skyscraper, it wouldn't increase the building on which the foundation is built any more in terms of monetary value other then in a very brief, very temporary-gimicky sense. It would ultimately be a loss to humanity that such a great work would be forever inaccessible.
A work of art doesn't need a world wide audience. An appreciative audience of one or two is enough to give a work of art the value it needs to justify its existence.
I don't know how much I have.. I've seen lots of art and taken some photos but many were of the thing itself.. hey, a lot at the auto show at the early Temporary Contemporary (that could be a thread). And I remember shows when I didn't have a camera, one at the SF MOMA with a lot of Monet haystacks and crowds, and the milling was interesting. Then Diane and I, when we first met as I visited New York, were at the Met and I saw the Manet Velasquez show something like nine times, and she a few times, and that whole scenario was a kind of dance of people looking and listening to phones and re looking. No photos but in my mind.
I've a memory of me seeing Luncheon of the Boating Party in a small room done as a small salon at the Phillips Collection, sitting by myself on a bench finding I didn't mind the painting. I'd previously been blah about Renoir. I probably looked at it for a half hour. I got up and looked closer as I left, and another woman came in and sat down on the bench. No photo.
@tsarstepan,
I strongly disagree, it is of value to be done, for the artist.
Let's get JLN in on this..
I get it that this is a discussed question. But to say the artist's perhaps sublime but of no notice effort is of no value is to say that that person's pulling together of aesthetic and psychological and spiritual or historical choices is a mere puff in space...
Actually, that's true. But I don't think those puffs are valueless.
The funniest picture I ever took in a museum (which I no longer have, sadly) was in the Louvre. I took a picture of a zillion tourists taking a pic of the Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is tiny! 13" x 9" ?? Small, anyway, with a roped off barricade around it, surrounded by, as I said, gazillions of picture-taking tourists... very funny.
Perosnally, I didn't find the Mona Lisa that picture-worthy. Give me a Van Gogh anytime.
@ossobuco,
I saw the original Keinholz car. On a date no less, at LACMA. No camera again.
Not to be all a2k chummy, but in this case we were - Mame and Thomas and I went to Santa Fe and looked at a bunch of galleries and concurred, nada.
We can be brutal..
Dys told me later that we missed the best area.
@ossobuco,
ossobuco wrote:
Not to be all a2k chummy, but in this case we were - Mame and Thomas and I went to Santa Fe and looked at a bunch of galleries and concurred, nada.
We can be brutal..
Dys told me later that we missed the best area.
Which was???? And why wasn't that skinny little **** with us?
@Mame,
It was apparently higher up the road.
That skinny little **** was probably chuckling.
@ossobuco,
I've seen the sign, and I do know that ophotography there is strctly forbidden, but here are some viewers in the Sistine Chapel
@Walter Hinteler,
I actually try to make photos (if allowed to photograph) without visitors, but ...
Musée d'Orsay
How do you post a picture here?
My daughter and I were at the East Building, Modern Art, of National Gallery of Art, Wash. DC in Nov. 09.
Would like to post some pixs.
This working?
Of course I am on the right, My beautiful daughter Angie, does hair in Washington DC.
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