by Tom Kondrat, Dublin.
I was looking at some interesting paintings one of my friends shared. The artist is Alexis Semtner. The imagery is interesting, I’m not sure why he paints instead of printing or drawing. I figure it is something about how painting is all about perception and the surface. A common thing for contemporary painting to explore is how we construct things both visually and conceptually. I don’t have much more to say with out an artist statement because I know so little about painting. (Good news, with further research I found out that is what is going on her paintings. She is also discussing something about Buddhism, which I’m super clueless about)
Back to the topic of this image. I have in the past have explained these types of images as an outcome of the flickr effect. Very atmospheric imagery that is suppose to create some kind of sanguine emotional state. However, look at the photo feed of this guy I saw something even more disappointing. He had another photo that was very similar to this, however it was much more suceeful. The scale of the figure worked better and didn’t have a poorly cropped scene. The space of the photo was also much more consistent in purpose from foreground to background.
This photo has a serious problem with the spacing of the depths. The foreground is compressed up against the bottom of the frame that creates too light weight of a base. The photo is unstable, like some bad spicy wings. The subject is also an odd choice in this image. Something about poorly placed subjects in massive landscapes really gets people going. We have this wall that was chosen for it’s weight (even if poorly implemented) with a super static subject, a bro-lady , sitting on it. Something so static does not relate well to the dynamic and complex tone of the main part of the image. I assume this is a crappy scan of a film negative because of the way the mid-tones are compressed. I can personally assure you that printed properly this would be incredibly luscious sky.
Anyways, I don’t understand why people love mediocre photos so much on the internet. Cropping the right third and bottom third and properly stretching out the tones would make this a serious god damn photo.
TLDR: Flickr is stuck at the level of beginning photo class full of underachievers. Want to see real landscape photography? Check out Lewis Baltz.
