Reply To: Should I do a corny christmas shoot?

[Dudley]

..and he spaketh again thusly, “I may not be great at photography but for me it’s just another fine art medium and I’ve studied and practised fine art my whole adult life. I have ideas about the kind of photography I want to do…”

 

Which is PRECISELY my point.  Do you honestly believe that if you haven’t the skills yet to do a so-called ‘cliche’ well that you can create something worthy of being called art by anyone other than yourself?  You can study and read about brain surgery for years, and unless you can handle the carving knife at Thanksgiving without creating turkey hash you will fail in the OR.

As for your comment re: Avedon?  Different genre?  I have news dor you oh student of fine art, Avedon used a camera, artier-Bresson used a camera, Adams used a camera….and every single one of them had mastered its use before producing ‘art’. And I can assure you that if you were truly a student of ‘fine art’ you would find that even they made pictures of cliches.  Only because of their skilld and talents those cliches were truly art.  Now quit rationalizing, self aggrandizing, and get back to practicing with your camera…..or by a paint by numbers set, change all the numbers so it won’t be a cliche, and then offer it to MOMA.