During one of my walks in the woods I came across this pair of rusty old nails lying on top of a pile of discarded tires.
Rusty Nails and Tire
Photography Today – From the BBC
Audience 1 Florence, 2004 by Thomas Struth
Is photography art? Today the answer is simple, indeed photography is more popular than ever and arguably the visual art of choice for the masses, but half a century ago the debate still raged.
In a new book, Photography Today, writer, artist and lecturer Mark Durden analyses more than 500 works by 150 artists from the past 50 years, exploring the impact of various genres, from pop art to documentary.
Here Durden offers his insight on ten important photographic works from the book”.
The ten (from 150) photographers chosen for the article are: Thomas Struth; Sarah Jones; Peter Fraser; Saidou Dicko; Alfredo Jaar; Anna Fox; David Goldblatt; Joel Sternfeld; Gillian Wearing; and Erwin Wurm.
As you can imagine when you do this kind of selection it inevitably leads to often passionate discussion as to why some are chosen and some are not. See this discussion from Rangefinder Forum, which gets into the photographers selected as well as a broader discussion about art and photography. I liked the Andy Warhol quote: “Art is what you can get away with”.
To my eternal shame I’d never even heard of 8 of the 10 chosen (although I’ll now certainly try to find out more about them).
The man in the mirror
I noticed these two blue and white vases at a local antiques fair and decided to take a picture. As I was taking it I spotted the mirror in the background and decided to wait until someone walked by behind me so I could get their reflection.
Old Car
I won’t go so far as to say that this car has been abandoned. The house in whose driveway it sits certainly isn’t. However, it does look as if it’s been there for some time. The paint is starting to flake and the moon roof has caved in.
Geese
One of the very few pictures I’ve taken of wildlife. I just don’t have the patience required to take good wildlife pictures. Wildlife photography also seems to require very fast telephoto lenses, which I don’t have and which are quite expensive to acquire.
This was taken during a walkabout with a friend. The geese were not happy to have us come close to their young and I know from experience that they can be quite aggressive when aroused. So we had to give them a wide berth. Luckily the grassy area to the right was quite wide so we could quite easily get around them. Otherwise it would have been a long walk back the way we came.