LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
Archives: Admired Photographs
One of the Most Important Things to Be Said – but Which Almost No One Says – about Our Photography
If what we really want from our photography is popularity, or praise from supposedly-important members of the “industry,” or a lot of money, or if we don’t think of ourselves as making art, then we won’t care about this. But our not-caring won’t change the crucial truth: If our goals are shallow, our photographs will be shallow. If we mainly want to make our photographs bright and brilliantly-colored, in order to catch people’s momentary attention on a screen, then that’s what they’ll be. If our principal aim in life is superficial, centered on worldly success or values, then our photographs will be superficial, no matter whether or not they’re shown in a prestigious gallery or praised by the writers for prominent publications.
Visionary “Correspondences”
. . . That is what opens up, in immersive fashion, in mystical experience: a sense that one is experiencing not some kind of glorious hyper-illusion, but rather the universe as it really is, when the doors of our perception are opened. And it’s that manner of vision that the greatest artists to try to evoke or manifest by their art, in works such as “Pepper No. 30” or Wynn Bullock’s “galactic” “Tidepool, Point Lobos” or Olivier Messiaen’s Lightning over the Beyond or Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And it’s central to what I pursue in my own art, in photos like “The Window Is at Your Feet,” “Ritual,” “Grass of the Midnight Sea,” “The Tree of Unsleeping Surveillance,” “Uprooted,” the “Marion” images, most of the works throughout my portfolios.
It Isn’t Intellect That Sees through the Matrix That Intellect Builds
The faculty that we call intellect is good for figuring out how to transport water uphill from the river to our hut. It can do astonishing things. It’s pretty useless, however, in disclosing the satisfactions of tasting that water, swimming in it, watching its ever-changing motions and reflections, hearing it as rain on a roof or waves on a beach. . . .
Poetic Photography and an Invitation to Fall in Love
In going through some boxes of my books, I unearthed a couple of treasures that I hadn’t seen in oh-too-many years. (Too few shelves, too little time!) One of them, called Dialogue with Photography, is a collection of interviews with master photographers. . . The book is filled with rareties and realities. When Imogen Cunningham is asked if Edward Weston ever bought one of her prints, she replies that he never had enough money to buy anyone’s work. In this and later posts, I’ll share with you some passages that I like especially, beginning with this from the wonderful Robert Doisneau. . . .
A Quiet Coming-Together: Walt Whitman, America, Keith Carter, This Post
These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing, If they do not enclose everything then they are next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying […]
The Cage of the “Surreal” – Part 2 of 2
I recently had three of my photographs chosen for an exhibition called “Strange Times” at the Atlanta Photography Group Gallery . That exhibition was conceived partly with the pandemic in mind. Yet none of my selected images was made since the start of the pandemic, and none was generated by a dream or even a waking fantasy.
A New “Marion” and a New Clue
As the title of this post promises, here is the photograph that just last week joined my ongoing, award-winning “Marion under the Moon” series. Its title is “Dream of the Playground Melting into Night.” Several friends of mine, seeing it for the first time, have ha wildly differing emotional reactions to it . . . One male friend said that the image provides “mysteries upon mysteries”. . . .
It Is Always at Your Doorstep
The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. – Paul Strand
A Surprise Bright Spot in My Confinement
I’m thrilled to be able to tell you that Keith Carter evidently read my three-post “Keith Carter and the Cloud of Mercy” on this site, and he posted this comment (which follows the end of Part 2): Thank you, got your thoughtful and kind review of my work. As you know, you write beautifully, and […]
Keith Carter and the Cloud of Mercy, Part 2 of 3
Anyone familiar with Keith Carter’s photography will have seen how often and how extremely Carter uses a common technique that’s referred to in various ways: limited or shallow depth field, bokeh, background blur, wide apertures, and so on. What it means is that most (or sometimes, in his case, almost all) of what appears in […]