I am a biomedical scientist by training. For the past 20 years, I've worked as a Research Director and Chief Scientific Officer for several biotech companies, focusing on the discovery and development of novel nucleic acid based therapeutics for a variety of diseases ranging from macular degeneration to cancer. Prior to this, I was a professor of Molecular Biology.
I have always been interested in photography, but over the past ten years or so I have become more intensely interested in the interface between art and science presented by the increasingly powerful tools of digital photography. I was certainly not an early adopter, feeling that medium format film represented a performance hurdle that digital approaches could not match. While some may still hold on to this thought, it's become clear to me that it's no longer an interesting debate. Digital photography and film are at least equally powerful but distinct tools. Carrying on about their relative strengths and weaknesses has been the focus of countless blogs and I'm not convinced I can add anything to the fading dialogue.
Never having had any formal training in art, and not having read much critical analysis about photography, I don't feel I have any particularly trenchant insights to provide about the deeper meaning and value of art in general or photography in particular. What terrific artists have to say about their own work is at best entertaining but rarely enlightening and often pretty silly, if not incomprehensible. As an example of the latter, I offer the writings of my favorite painter, Kandinsky. For me, photography provides a potential path to artistic creativity that might otherwise be provided by, for example, the ability to draw, paint, or make music. I am not interested in reproducing reality, whatever that might be. I'd like my pictures to be painterly, without being offensively manipulated. However, and it's been said countless times, all images are manipulated -the trick is to find the appropriate tools for an endpoint that satisfies the artist's vision without overcooking.
My motivation for posting my pictures is simply to share them. If you happen to see one you like - if a particular picture causes you to stop browsing temporarily and triggers a sense of shock, wonder, bewilderment or memory, or if it represents to you a proper or unexpected organization of natural forms - then the process of photography will have done its magic again. We are spectacularly fortunate to have unprecedented technologies that permit the creation and easy sharing of such images, for which the ultimate purpose must be the deeper appreciation of the world around us.
I have always been interested in photography, but over the past ten years or so I have become more intensely interested in the interface between art and science presented by the increasingly powerful tools of digital photography. I was certainly not an early adopter, feeling that medium format film represented a performance hurdle that digital approaches could not match. While some may still hold on to this thought, it's become clear to me that it's no longer an interesting debate. Digital photography and film are at least equally powerful but distinct tools. Carrying on about their relative strengths and weaknesses has been the focus of countless blogs and I'm not convinced I can add anything to the fading dialogue.
Never having had any formal training in art, and not having read much critical analysis about photography, I don't feel I have any particularly trenchant insights to provide about the deeper meaning and value of art in general or photography in particular. What terrific artists have to say about their own work is at best entertaining but rarely enlightening and often pretty silly, if not incomprehensible. As an example of the latter, I offer the writings of my favorite painter, Kandinsky. For me, photography provides a potential path to artistic creativity that might otherwise be provided by, for example, the ability to draw, paint, or make music. I am not interested in reproducing reality, whatever that might be. I'd like my pictures to be painterly, without being offensively manipulated. However, and it's been said countless times, all images are manipulated -the trick is to find the appropriate tools for an endpoint that satisfies the artist's vision without overcooking.
My motivation for posting my pictures is simply to share them. If you happen to see one you like - if a particular picture causes you to stop browsing temporarily and triggers a sense of shock, wonder, bewilderment or memory, or if it represents to you a proper or unexpected organization of natural forms - then the process of photography will have done its magic again. We are spectacularly fortunate to have unprecedented technologies that permit the creation and easy sharing of such images, for which the ultimate purpose must be the deeper appreciation of the world around us.
© Barry Polisky