Essentializing

Breakfast Table
Originally uploaded by Poundstone.

A link to this via this brought me to this: Crown Point Press founder Kathan Brown talking about how artist Wayne Thiebaud talks about his work as a process of:

"essentializing....as a sauce reduced in cooking"

Now, normally I don't like fake words, but this one seems interesting and useful . By focusing our attention on *anything* we can "essentialize" it. We can make it urgent, we can call it *important*. And to me, there are so many wonderful reasons for something to be important: if it's beautiful, if it says something about our lives, if it conjures or somehow holds a memory...

I've been thinking a lot lately about the pictures I take. It may seem weird to say this, but I like them so much. I feel them. And pictures like the one up there, of a simple breakfast table, evoke so much emotion to me - these dishes, this sun, that shadow the butter makes - these elements all feel like words in a poem. They're specific and evocative. I don't know if the photos feel that way to people other than me. Although, while I'd love other people to love them, that's not my primary concern.

At the show (mentioned in the last post) at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, some of the first photographs taken with 35mm cameras were on display. And the writers of the text surrounding the display were making the point that this new kind of highly portable camera had made photographers free to capture all kinds of scenes - not just formal portraits. Candid shots became a possibility, and people began to look more like real people in their real lives - moving living and breathing people rather than paper dolls.

For me, the digital camera (in part because of its format, and in part because I don't have to think at all about paying for processing) has given me the freedom to start *seeing* new things, chronicling beauty anywhere and everywhere I spot it. And by seeing more, and looking more, I've found beauty in more places than ever before - and in places I never would have otherwise looked. Like the breakfast table.