With very few exceptions, my photography is thoroughly dependent on my ability to transport myself from one location to another. The only time I don't use a car to go photographing has been my trips to Japan and China. Even there an important part of my success in photography relies on an effective transportation strategy. I never used to think about this in my youth, but now a transportation strategy has become a huge requirement I dare not ignore or take for granted

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A large part of the production of fine art photographs involves a frustration that we wish our images were better. We'd like them to be more. The implied question is what more could you add to your photographs that would make you happy? More sharpness? More audience? More exotic locations? More print sales? If you could wave a magic wand, what precisely would you bring into your photographic life that would bring you satisfaction?

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of media in our generation and the growth of fiction. Most of what we see on television is a fiction, video games are a fiction, so much of YouTube is a fiction, and even social media includes a significant amount of fiction. AI is going to compound this. It's not surprising that so much of photography (a quintessential 20th century medium) has become a fiction. Is it fair to say that our generation, compared to our ancestors, have been thoroughly seduced by the fictions of media? As a means of resistance, is it possible to use photography as a tool to bridge the gap between life and fiction?

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LW1487 - The Photography I Love

Aesthetic conventions come and go. Culture and popular tastes are constantly changing. Example: There are no radio stations that play big band music anymore even though it once ruled the airwaves. The photographic aesthetic I grew up with and still love to this day is losing audience and slowly sliding into history. All the more reason to spend time with and enjoy the work we love and love doing, while we can.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

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Yesterday I was talking about how we might describe what we photographers actually do. Is the core of our activities that we build something or is it that we observe something? Here are a few additional thoughts about this distinction that might change a great deal about our creative life.

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Terminology is such an interesting thing. For some time now, I've used the term "project" as the nomenclature for something produced with multiple images and a small amount of text or title. Of late, however, I have come to think of the word "observation" as perhaps a better term to illustrate the core of this activity in our art life. Observation is less about what we make and more about what is revealed to us, and as such seems closer to the core of what makes our artwork worth viewing.

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I'm not sure the title of this commentary is actually true, but it does point to a thought that can be helpful. In essence, how we make pictures is constantly changing since the first days of photography. Technology marches on, continually, relentlessly. The content of what are photographs portray, the artistic content, remains relevant and possibly even innovative even after the passage of decades.

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Here, deep in the age of media, doesn't it seem obvious that there is a raging and ever-present contest for our attention. Consider the next hour of leisure in your life. What will you do with that 60 minutes? Watch TV? Read a book? Listen to some music? Go shopping? Spend time with your friends or family? Or, will you dedicate those 60 minutes to looking at art, especially photographic art?

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There now exist so many different media we can choose for the output of our photographs. These choices imply that we need to process our images with the output medium in mind. An image intended for a small scale phone/screen presentation is likely to require different processing than if we intend to make a large scale framed print. We could possibly have a dozen different completions with any given image, each produced for a different kind of presentation.

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Over the years, I've talked a lot about using a camera like a Xerox copy machine. If your photograph shows me what I would have seen had I been standing next to you at the moment of exposure, how does your photograph bring me something new, something from you, something valuable?

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