Abstract Photography

Abstract Photography

One thing about abstract photography is that deduction or induction don’t work well to get at the meaning of the photograph.  Abstract photography encourages you to seek other ways to understand meaning. Other methods that are different from rational thinking.  You can create conjectures and inferences to arrive at a meaning, and still you don’t know if it was the original meaning the artist intended. Scientific, analytic and synthetic methods gum up as they approach abstraction. They are not capable of extracting meaning out of an object. Their goal is to describe their existence.

As the meaning for me might be different from your meaning, and those meanings can be different from the meaning of a person standing outside. The way we can get at a common meaning is by a conversation that exchanges conjectures and inferences. And still this is just a shared meaning among a few, it is not absolute. Abstract photography then becomes a conversation starter that has as a goal to share our meanings of the images.

Abstract photography has also a temporal component. As photography in general does, it captures a moment in the past. Seizing that moment in time is a fixed action. While the meanings can continue their course changing their essence as time goes by. The meaning changes in time because the cultural perspectives that are viewing the image shift as references of comparison emerge or disappear.

The abstract theme within photography can maintain the visual integrity of the object. It can also keep its context in which the object exists and still be considered abstract.  The intent of the individual at the moment when the photograph was captured is the element that renders it abstract. The freezing in time of a split of a second that turns the photography abstract. Leading you to ask what happened before or after and question its meaning.

Subscríbete a mi boletín! Clickea aquí!

Check out my other post: Hojarasca, A zu lado, or Red Orange