Souls At The Moment Of Night

 
The intrigue behind this work is how much time I spent on it for not a whole heck of a lot going on.

The St. Louis skyline near sunset from the roof of The Last Hotel – I knew it was a good capture the moment I grabbed it. It turned out to be such a good photograph there seemed little ‘art’ I could drag out of it. It was already art, so it said to me. I worked for hours and had only managed a few subtle enhancements, and even that was using in the background some of the extreme abstract techniques I’ve been working with these last several months.

Hence, the dilemma of intervention; the photograph is the starting point. And from there, it’s judging how far to take the photograph to reveal the art. Sometimes, little is required.

That’s the problem. As a photograph, it was pretty, it was a nice travelogue shot, it was a study in perfect camera craft, and did nothing to push boundaries or see anything new. Yeah … no, can’t settle for that, no sir.

I fixated on the eeriness of the city undergoing its night metamorphosis. I created separate copies and applied different techniques to each, then blended them together. Even with all that, the changes are STILL subtile. The perfection of the initial photograph dominating the work, to the extent that the abstracting may seem as add-ons rather than part of a unified vision.

Yeah … don’t know that I like it. Maybe, in the great scheme of things, good photographs make lousy photo art. Should I have been satisfied enough with the initial capture? Why did I have to go off on some vision quest? Then again …