What are you up to? -A Sunday Walkabout

"What are you guys up to?" I heard someone from behind asking.

I had gone out early this Sunday with a fellow photographer Johnny Kerr, and we were walking around taking pictures of things that caught our eye.

This Sunday we were exploring the warehouse district in Downtown Phoenix.

We had seen and made our into a back alley behind some restaurants. The guy who asked must've been one of the employees who's there a couple of hours before opening to set things up.

I answer "we're just taking pictures" turning from the scene I had been photographing. "Of floor mats?" he asks incredulously as I turn to see the scene I was working on. To which my friend Johnny answers "you can make art out of anything " and I sniggered.

The guy just said " OK" unconvincingly and headed back into the restaurant.

I turn to Johnny, showed him the picture I was taking and told him I really liked the picture I made from the floor mats.

I still don't know why this image works for me, but I'll continue to contemplate it and learn what I can from it.

Besides the photo though, what called my attention was the exchange with the person. Maybe its easy for me to forget, when I'm absorbed looking for relationships between different visual components, that seeing someone on his heels, with a camera and shooting a floor mat can seem very strange. But besides the oddity of the scene, I think it also has to do with what people typically expect to find in a photograph and floor mats might not be very high on that list.

Photographs it seems are constantly expected to be beautifully taken of beautiful subjects. Also since photographs tend to capture in a very precise way our reality, it seems that some how the expectation is that photographs are to be documentary.

Something similar was originally thought of painting at some point in the past, then it went from cultivating techniques to realistically represent reality, to branching out afterwards into exploring different aspects of reality such as color, lines, shapes, the concept behind, etc. and several art movements were born.

This has happened in Photography as an art form as well. We already have great names in photography that have explored abstract photography or surreal photography as examples of this. But then again, painting, in some circles, at times is still expected to depict something in a realistic way, and since photography has a closer connection to realism as a medium, I guess we can expect that anything other than traditional photography is going to be questioned frequently.

Hope you enjoyed this week's musings,

Andres Gonzalez

PS: I took a street portrait of Johnny in the same alley: