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unnamed thirty four, 2018 | william oldacre – sidelong series abstract expressionism, city street, urban, movement, motion, red, blue, brown, vibrant

Vehicle or Art Form

abstract expressionism, city street, urban, movement, motion, red, blue, brown, vibrant
Unnamed Thirty Four — Sidelong :: (click image to see more)

When I first began thinking about this post I thought I had a clear argument, but now as I write it – not so sure. In this year’s Toronto Contact Photography Festival catalogue it seems a lot of the publicized exhibitions are photography as a vehicle to express a concept rather than photography as an art form. I’ve never been a great fan of photography as a means to express a non-photographic concept, I prefer photography as a means to express a visual idea – like landscape, portraiture, abstraction etc.

But here’s where my argument breaks – and I’m guilty of doing this myself since all my abstract work is really at it’s heart the exploration of emotion – which is a concept not a visual idea, oops. Perhaps the prevalence of photography as vehicle has arisen due to the explosion of quality imagery expressing visual ideas – so now it’s a more popular avenue to explore. Perhaps we’re beating the visual idea thing to death and are merely refining and tweaking the long explored precepts – iterating with each new generation of photographers… or maybe I’m just jaded.

Either way I’m trying to think of some new idea to explore photography as an art form, but – I’m afraid all I’ll be doing is iterating and refining an already well defined idea.

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