artistry

Main Street Art Festival going on downtown this weekend. Been to a few of these things before in other cities, such as Austin (Pecan Street Fair) and Denver (Cherry Creek Art Festival), and they are always overrated and overcrowded. What sours me is the huge, sweaty, smoky, and general stagnant mass of people. I don't do well with crowds. At all.

The photography booths were somewhat disappointing, now upon further reflection. It was like everyone was just emulating Ansel Adams of Dorthea Lange (i.e. vast b/w western landscapes/time-lapse waterfalls and b/w's of sad rustbelt western cities, respectively). I guess neither of these locales were particularly interesting because I live in them, I can aim my car thirty miles in any direction from my house and see a decrepit silo or a lone, grand oak in a field. So, I noticed a lot of the photographers were not from the true West, but from places like urban Ohio, and this was surely the reason. It's all about your audience and knowing who they are. Sure, this stuff would be fucking fantastic if you lived in NYC or London or Istanbul--that is why I love all of my European Blip contacts--you show me worlds I don't know, I can't see, that I will probably never be able to see.

I realize I am being overly critical and priggish but I am not a professional photographer, and I sure as hell am not looking to have someone pay me hundreds of dollars (or one dollar) for my photos: the Earth is public domain. Does photography require the least amount of talent of all the fine arts: where does the discerning eye begin and the price tag of your equipment end? (I am not looking for either debate or an answer). Take, for example, this man, Kevin Peterson; he essentially paints like a photograph looks and he places his subjects in brightly colored urban settings on hugely realized canvasses. Like a post-modern, post-apocalyptic Caravaggio or something. This takes something which far surpasses skill, this takes an innate gift to manifest a human, a human you could almost feel as real, with a brush and colored oil.

So, what of my photo here? This was taken within the first minute (maybe even less) of us getting to the Art Festival. Leah and I dismounted and locked up our bicycles and walked immediately by this alley en route into the maw of the populated beast. Here we were surrounded by an explosion of expression and the best image of the day was an alley with the angle of a sunlight spear. This was not some display in irony but instead a huge lesson for me.