November 02, 2013

All images are abstractions.

Found this in Kit White's "101 things to Learn in Art School" (The MIT Press, 2011) as lesson #14:
"All images are abstractions.
Even photographs. They are never the thing pictured; they are a conceptual or mechanical reproduction of a thing past. This may seem obvious, but it has everything to do with the way we perceive and use images. As pictures are symbolic assemblages of forms, recognizable or not, they are always metaphors. Metaphor is the medium of symbolic language and is the language of art. Realism in art is anything but. The greater the art, the greater the illusion."
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Kit White accompanied this by an own image after Rene Magritte, a creator of great illusions and metaphors.

Square Seascape, abstract

Searching for the abstract in photography is not always easy: because unless you defocus the lens or do some weired post-processing photography tends to reproduce reality. So where's the abstract coming in?
Well, the following might be an example that needed only a little tweaking color-wise to lead the eye/brain into seeing something different than the subject I was reproducing here. It also has the interesting side-effect of working better when viewed small: The larger you view the image the clearer it becomes what it "really" is.
I also used the square format to make the geometry pretty simple and not distracting from the colors and textures.
But anyhow, I hope you like it:

Square Seascape 70084