Modern Art and photography - now what do I do?

Well, after yesterday's visit to the Art Institute in Chicago I must say I enjoyed reading this thread. Consider:

In the Modern Art gallery - around 13 framed 8-1/2x11 sheets of white graph paper, island mounted and framed in white, portrait, with a single pencil-drawn diagonal line drawn corner to corner, from NW to SE. That's it. Nothing more. Whither narrative (they can't speak - but do they need to??? - I sure as heck couldn't figure it out)? Whither metaphor?? Hmmm...

Upon reading the artist's explanation, it turns out these were inspired by his now-dead partner's medical readouts of his T-cell count, which was basically in decline as he died of AIDS. So the artist made these graph pages, and framed them. Interesting - as far as it goes. Empathy? Of course - dealing with death and dying must invoke that. But art? I'm still having trouble with that.

On the other hand, if narrative is an important aspect of art, then these works are loaded with it - only when one understands the narrative behind the work does the work suddenly come alive. Very odd. I find myself continuing to reflect on these works today as I write this. And research it (check this out: http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/singular_forms/highlights_13a.html ).

Dunno. Certainly has implications for our work in photography. Certainly makes me question even bothering with "pretty picture" compositions any more.

A couple black/white pix I'm working on.

I took this shot a few days ago, out the window of my car while I was stopped at a traffic light. I find myself doing that, or more often wanting to do that, a lot. Makes me wish, sometimes, that I had a hood mounted camera or something like that, where I could snap a shot where ever I happened to be looking when I wanted to.



This is a straight b/w conversion from a color raw file. I was trolling through a bunch of raws that I hadn't looked at before when I found it. I immediately thought it would look good as b/w, so I converted it in Photoshop. Did some minor adjustments to the tone, but it's otherwise pretty much a straight, full frame shot.

Greetings