LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

Doggone it, I've come down with Covid. After 1,931 days in a row without missing a single day, I'm needing to take a few days off to rest and recover. Hopefully, I be back in a few days rarin' to go. In the meantime, not a bad time to scan back and see if there are any episodes you missed.

I'm here for a 5-hour layover at the Denver Airport. I was tempted to not record any comments in the hubbub of the airport background noise, but that led to an interesting train of thought.

It's customary to sign your finished prints in the lower right hand corner. Some people sign on the mat board, others sign on the print itself, some sign on the back of the print. They're various strategies and various philosophies about this. But what does it actually mean when you sign your print?

We are memetic creatures. We learn by observing others and then by copying what we see. This is most visible in babies and toddlers, but is equally true of artists and photographers.

Photography may not be the best medium for philosophy, but that doesn't mean that photography isn't guided, shaped, informed, influenced by a philosophical background. Said another way, art is the marriage between images and ideas. It's easy to see that photography without an image is not art. It's much more difficult to realize that photography without an idea is not art.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is for most unknown photographers to get published? In one of those dirty little secrets of the publishing industry, most magazines choose to publish the photographs of famous photographers because they want to ride the coattails of the famous individual. Needless to say, here at LensWork we've chosen a different path and try to bring to light the best work we can based on its merit.