This idea may not find much popularity on the Slap boards, but I think some of you may find it interesting...
". . . . I should try to tell, in a straightforward way, plain stories, so that I will try to get away from mazes, from mirrors, from daggers, from tigers, because all of those things now grow a bit of a bore to me. So that I will try to write a book, a book so good that nobody will think I have written it. I would write a book - I won't say in somebody else's style - but in the style of anybody else."
-Jorge Luis Borges
I find this relative to photography and the direction in which new technology may be taking it. Personally, the spectacle of technology has grown a bit of a bore to me. I'm not really interested in what computers can do. I don't really like skate photography. Some of it is interesting; I like Ed Templeton's Canon AE-1 stuff, if that's considered skate photography, but most skate photos are "bring the studio to the spot" shots that are flat, over-saturated, and poorly layer masked. As photographs, they are not that compelling. As for HDR... to each his/her own, but I really think it looks terrible. I'm not trying to start shit, just maybe a discussion.
Here's an excerpt from an interview that can be read here...
http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archives/a_conversation_with_michael_lundgren/JC: A lot of photographers are trying to push the boundaries of what photography actually is, and I do sense a bit of that in your work. Is this something you are interested in?
ML: Yes and No. I?m simply trying to understand photography, to make work that deals with photographic formalism, an often-misunderstood idea. Formalism is not just about the way content is arranged; it is a means of relating medium specificity to a larger impulse. Dealing with the medium in a simple way is enough for me. The word radical comes from the Latin ?radix?, meaning root. Much contemporary work is disconnected to the trace of history, disjointed from the essential paradox of photography. Instead it becomes based on technological possibilities and the spectacle of the subject, not on a primary understanding of the medium. Photography?s future is in peril. New technology has made the medium more democratic, but a nuanced understanding of the inherent dialectic in photography is at the risk of being lost or disregarded. In the end, I hope that my work is in conversation with a lineage and that my part in that conversation moves picture-making forward.
Again, this is not an attack, and I understand that most people think my photographs and photographs that I find interesting are boring.