Rudolfo Anaya, Presente!
25 Pieces of a Chicano's Lenseye: Gallery for Plague-time
I can’t imagine anyone buying a photograph for five figures, like a $16,000 print by Ansel Adams. That’s FOB the internet.
After that, the seller wants ten percent more for tax, and another hundred bucks to box it and ship it. Damn; sixteen grand should be the price FOB your wall. Stuff should go for twenty or thirty bucks---good stuff--and larger sizes no more than $300, in a frame.
Art mongers say a price isn’t for the sheet of paper nor the artifact. The price buys Adams lugging a heavy wooden view camera into wildernesses hundreds of times before he could make that one photograph.
Thing is, because Adams didn’t lug an easel out there to paint that landscape, that sixteen grand is not buying anything unique. The message, “Ansel Adams,” is the medium, and that’s reproduceable thousands of times over, each copy exactly equal to the first one printed. What's that worth to the photog? What's that worth to the buyer?
Photography is the greatest Democratic arte. Everyone can make good photographs on purpose. The main requirement of good photography is time and place. And eye.
A photographer goes looking for things to see. A photograph happens on purpose, by design. Serendipity helps, of course.
Here are twenty-five images I captured in a two-hour morning window. Each image required between 1/1000 of a second and 1/1250s. I station myself for fifteen or twenty minutes in a place with good views of several flowers.
Today was rainy, meaning special light and water droplets to refract light and catch your eye.
Using a 70-300mm lens, usually racked to 300mm, hand-eye coordination come into reflexive use the moment a bird or bee makes its way into the chosen field of focus. When that happens, I take a lot of pictures, and rely on the experience of thousands of previous exposures to get one or two good ones today.
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