[ART]_CONnected

SLOW DOWN

The real voyage of discovery consist not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. 

(Marcel Proust)

Our today's society can‘t do anything with the little ones, with tranquility and spirituality. Everything is huge, flashy, pushy. Perfection and flawless behavior are expected in all areas.

Our aesthetic ideas are reflecting this world: smooth, flawless, characterless. White porcelain, concrete, metal, edges, corners, straight lines, disclaiming everything soft, natural and rounded. Instead of sensuality there is sterile beauty. The aesthetics of the industrialial, the machine-crafted, the useful is prevailing -  an aesthetic of chilliness.

This idea of perfection don't let us find our innere peace. Have we reached a level of perfection, then we need to strive for even greater perfection. But we will never achieve this impossible goal - and we are blaming ourselves.

It is incredibly difficult to break free of this quest for perfection. We require error-free photograph. But "error-free" does not exist. Where is the soul, the feeling? With all our measuring, thinking, pondering we kill our creative side. Photos are reduced to products. Photography is suddenly no longer a image of our soul. As we are focusing exclusively on the technical aspects it in fact gets meaningless and unimportant. The majority does not want any soul but photos that look as if they were made by machines. Custom-made commodity.

We need an aesthetic concept where the given is accepted, a concept that works with nature, a concept of artistic interpretation of what is given and of the humble. An emotional art in which the artistic intention has priority and includes the "error" as part of the aesthetic whole with. A photograph, which goes beyond the golden ratio and the perfect aperture, where not the non-sterile perfection but the transient, the incorrect counts. We need to have room again for the small, ugly, unheeded. For simplicity. For the broken, holey, rusty. Photography as a reduction, as an admiration for the small, hidden things of life.

We must (re) learn to appreciate the moment in all its facets. We need to (re) learn to look at the little things in life, realize that it does not make us happier chasing after money, to have the latest camera, a big car. We need to (re) learn to accept what happened and to enjoy it, so "imperfect" the moment may be. We need to (re) find a photograph that gives us the freedom to photograph what we want most, what is important for without being forced in the corset of photographic rules and conventions, without squinting out what "the market" requires or what is "mainstream" or "contemporary" at the moment.

We need a photograph that lives by humility. Not spectacular sunsets, grossly enlarged (but meaningless) images or artfully arranged beauties, but reduction to the essentials, the play of light and shadow, to structures, on the capture of changes and the ephemeral. A quiet, slow photography.

We must (re) learn to allow "errors". Iris reflections, burned, boozed shadows. If the image is corresponding with our sense at the end, if it reveales its soul, we should accept "failure" as a part of the picture, even use them deliberately. Nothing is perfect - especially in photography.

We must (re) learn to give more room to feelings in our photography. More important than all considerations are intuition, the meditative sinking and the experience of the moment. We need to make images that are not staged and "conjures up" by technology. We need to (re) learn not to take pictures with the head but from the gut. More important than the concrete is an image that appeals to the subconscious. The pursuit of greater technical perfection leads to nothing, is killing the imagination and freezes us.