Please note that due to the narrow template columns (and my lack of ability in laying out these posts correctly) that you must click the images to see the entire view in some cases.
As with most things, there is an art as to how you make your initial presentation and how it is perceived. I had been so enamored with my art that I had even blown said pose up larger than usual on speculation. To me this was a prize-winning shot. Talk about not seeing the forest for the tree--I was not ready when the husband said, "Wow I love this one, but you CAN get rid of that stuff all over the picture in the finished print can't you?" He was referring to the carefully blurred leaf frame. In his mind, it was some defect in the processing that I had merely neglected to correct in the proof. So much for art. Since then I have always felt a need to explain that the foreground objects are SUPPOSED to be there.
You can insist on artistic liberties when you, the artist, are the only one who has to be satisfied. Not so when your subjects or clients must sign off before paying the bill. As I recall, the wife got it and they did indeed order that one enlargement, but their other picture choices for Christmas gifts were ones without the leaf frame. To each his own.
There will always be those who get it, and those who do not. But my salient point is that sometimes it matters, and sometimes it does not. It should always matter at least somewhat. Art is a lot of things to different people. Sometimes it is not art at all--if art is not what is desired by the intended viewer--especially if the viewer is a paying consumer. Art is your own self-expression, but if no one gets it at all, what good is it? Maybe even then it can satisfy some deeply intrinsic purpose for the producer of the art. But if art is expression in the sense of communication, then someone has to get it or you have not expressed or communicated at all.
There are different levels of expectation and sophistication in the consumers of art. I suppose ultimately, it depends upon whether or not your work satisfies the consumer, if it is to be enjoyed by them. Sometimes the consumer merely wants a clear picture that is finely focused and shows ultimate details. Sometimes the consumer does not want to see things the way they really are; they'd rather see an illusion. A successful photographer has to second-guess and/or try to determine whether to be an artist or a craftsman or both. He also must reckon with who is paying the bill. If it is merely himself--and if he has no hopes or expectations of ever making any money or becoming well-known or selling his photographs--then I suppose it may not matter who else besides himself likes his pictures .I have never been that arrogant.
Thomas Kinkeade never gained the adoration of the critics or the snooty artists--but he gained the adoration for his work of the common people who liked the way his pictures looked enough to buy them. By the droves. If I was a critical person, I could find a lot to criticize about Thomas Kinkeade--whom I never respected much personally--but it would not be with either the beauty of his paintings, nor his marketing abilities (which really means, his good understanding of what people want and how to provide it).
Thomas was a least a good artist--but he was a genius of telling his story, sticking to it, and presenting it well. He was a genius of marketing his work and himself. Thomas was as much a theatrical magician as he was an artist. He brought a lot of relatively inexpensive art to peoples homes, which brightened their lives and presumably made them feel better for having it. His stories as to why he became the painter of light, became indelibly linked to the characteristic golden glow from within the homes and buildings in his paintings. And guess who gave himself that title. I don't know how many paintings and prints of his painting Kinkeade sold during his liftime (and by-the-way) they are still selling steadily through the privately owned franchise stores and now gaining in value since his death. But it is way more than any other painter has every sold--exponetially I am guessing. He made a lot of money in the process. Everybody wins, and that's a lot of self-expression. Don't tell me Thomas Kinkeade was not a real artist.
I wish that I could become the Thomas Kinkeade of photography. In fact, now that I have articulated it just so, maybe I will set out to do that. It would be a worthy goal as far as I am concerned. It would mean that droves of the masses would first see my photographs, and that they would like them enough to pay a reasonable amount for each of them, AND that they would tell others who would do the same. There is genius in that. I admire genius.
Yes, I experienced the burdens of making pictures to suit other people day in and day out for years on end while seldom making the kinds of pictures that suited me. Shame on me. It was no one's fault but my own. It is the same old story of the woodsman nat taking the time to sharpen the axe, or the woodworker the saw. Ultimately it killed the initial enjoyment that I had found in photography. Balance must be kept. If it is not, the golden goose dies. This does NO ONE any service. I got out of photography and it was years before I even could pick up a camera without a sense of dread.
I have found it pertinent to refer to Benjamin Franklin in two separate web-logs regarding two very separate topics within the same day. Moderation in all things, is one of many of his maxims. It is a good one. While one must pay heed to the desires of those paying the bills while making photographs for them, one must also interlace enough fun and experimentation and private art pictures just for art sake--to please the artist as well.While you don't have to get snooty about it, you can be deliberate about the art prints that you display, and to an extent, if you are careful, you can even show only the proofs that you choose to show.And you can pursue a particular style in your own genre gallery of artistic photographs.
You can and should develop your own identifiable style. Even if it sometimes raises eyebrows and questions as to why you do things the way you do them. Back to the foreground thing that I do as a matter of style. Look at the different photos that I took yesterday on my walk. By this late date in my artistic/photographic evolution I have a method. I don't even consciously think much about it. I find myself grabbing the fleeting shots that are available as quickly as I can to the technical degree that I can given the tools available at the moment.
Then I start changing things up, adding elements here and deleting elements there, composing on the fly, observing all the things I have to work with and incorporating them as I can. I want to make art from my pictures. I want to capture and document, but I also want to do it through my own prism. I have worked as a news photographer before, but I am not a news photographer now in the conventional sense. I have experience in both photography and in life. It effects the way I see things and it effects the way that I want to portray things that I see. I am making art. It is both challenging and it is fun.
If it was neither challenging nor fun--I would not take pictures anymore.