Web Page 3, my Cityscape Gallery, is up

Here is my Cityscape Gallery. I wanted to do rollovers, but this was the path of least resistance, and besides, it allowed me to spend more time actually taking pictures. There will be time for these "rollovers" later.

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the city through the lens of my Kodak Easyshare camera. Someday I will get a real camera, but in the meantime, I can live with "grainy" night shots. Pixilated is perhaps more accurate, graininess being more appropriately applied to film, as I understand it-- Not to put too fine a point on it....

Last week's foray into theory was both exciting and frustrating for me. I love that stuff, and could go on forever about it. I was inspired to look up some things I read awhile back in college:

Oscar Wilde wrote some interesting essay-type things in the form of dialogues (Platonic, I might say, but they're always smoking cigarettes and laying about divans and such -- maybe not so un-Platonic, actually), one of which is the Decay of Lying. In it he complains about the growth of the tendency towards realism in the literature of his time. It was published in 1891. He sings the praises of art and artifice as opposed to the joys of nature:

My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

In examining architecture through photography, I have always been drawn to the ways in which it interacts with nature. Ivy on a building, trees in a courtyard, the silhouette of a statue against a sunset sky. These seem rather trite examples, but the theme has been an interesting one to me since I took photography class in college. I took a lot of pictures back then that I didn't do much with, of Chicago. Perhaps I will scan some and use them in this class eventually...

For the current page, I made a point of going to the Empire State Plaza at night. The enormous lights they use to light up all the buildings there make for some interesting play of light and shadow. A great building like the State Capitol looks especially impressive at night when it's lit up like a movie set.

Another theme along similar lines I find especially compelling is that of construction and scaffolding. Also the interplay of patterns. The pattern of a scaffold superimposed on the facade of a building. There seems to be a kind of visual irony in the covering of a building with scaffolding. The summer I took my photography class, there was a church in Hyde Park the steeple of which was surrounded by scaffolding. I never took any pictures of it (unfortunately), but I always thought it was an ominous image if interpreted symbolically: The church is in need of repair....

So I find Wilde's sophistry quite intoxicating and persuasive. In the same volume in which "The Decay of Lying" was published (Intentions) is another piece called "The Critic as Artist, with some remarks on the importance of doing nothing." In it he contradicts "the gross popular error" that it is easier to talk about a thing than to do it:

It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it....

The idea is that the critical faculty is integral to creating art, and that much great art is a form of criticism. The critic uses the material being criticised as raw material for a new form. And finding the right words for a poetic description of a deed is harder than the deed itself. It is not difficult because it must be true -- it is difficult because it must be beautiful. As the "The Deacy of Lying" explains, truth has no place in Art. As Wilde puts it, :"Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."