Thursday, September 9, 2010

Litchfield Minnesota, Noon, September 8, 2010

This view looked real spacious, but the photo looks flat. Somebody told me once that photographs look flat, and it takes drawing to show space.

Taking this picture made me think of a comment of David Hockney's. Hockney, a Brit in his seventies or eighties, is a painter who's probably Picasso's most interesting heir. Anyway, Hockney said that photographs and most paintings show things from the point of view of a cyclops with his head in a vise. In other words, when we view them we don't get the benefit of comparing multiple vantage points: binocular vision's two slightly different ones, and the countless serial ones that come from moving. Fair enough, but when I look at a picture by somebody who refuses to be that paralyzed cyclops, all I can see is analysis.

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