"After I take your class, I will be able to do photography, right?"
I knew what the woman meant when she asked me this, but it still made me laugh. If she gets photography in a two hour class, I'm going to be pissed. It's taken me a lot longer than that. I just read a blog post today and the author Guy Tal included this quote by Alfred Stieglitz,
"This class (of photographers) devote the best part of their lives to the work, and it is only after an intimate acquaintance with them and their productions that the casual observer comes to realize the fact that the ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired offhand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.
One subtle but important gift photographers bring to their viewers is the gift of gesture. Today, as I ate my fried eggs and tomato for breakfast, I watched the dandelions out my window. Every living thing has gesture. It is the job of the photographer to capture that precise moment when the life of a thing is exposed. In my mind, that is the definition or art and perhaps, as well, the definition of beauty.