First Post Ever

The strategic, tactical, and philosophical parameters of Really Abstract

Welcome to the first episode of Really Abstract where I post abstract street photography recorded while wandering aimlessly but aimfully, now that I’m a professional flaneur.

For my first post ever, I’ll introduce my project by way of quotations from three twentieth century masters that set the strategic, tactical, and philosophical parameters for what I think I’m up to when I click the shutter button on my camera.

Picasso’s provocation from 1935 speaks to the general methodology for street photography that splits the difference between realism and abstraction. Shoot something, crop out the traces of reality and it could be anything.

There is no abstract art. You must start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality.

In deciding what to shoot to impart a painterly quality on the photographic image, I take guidance from the loosely translated statement below made by Nicolas de Staël in 1950. Once removed from its original context, this image must seem to have been composed as if a painting.

The only serious research in a picture is depth. And a picture is organized space.

Even if I crop out the elements that might identify my subject matter as walls or windows or whatnot, architecture is a fundamental component of my street photography. I’ve taken some of the philosophical ideas of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as my own. His motto of “less is more” certainly resonates with my photography. Apparently he also said that “God is in the details” which I can identify with too, at least in an agnostic sense that such things can be important enough to go from minor to major.

The following three pictures illustrate these parametrs and represent a progression of development that led to Lyrical Realism.

The picture below was taken in 2011, when I only ever took pictures while on vacation in Paris. I don’t remember where I was exactly, but I do remember feeling compelled to take a photo then and there. My peripheral vision caught a field vivid blue. It was a recently painted portal that was freshly scratched up, likely by the first delivery van that passed through it. Later, I cropped it to make the scratch the subject and rotated it counter-clockwise. It was my first really abstract picture.

The picture below was taken in 2015 in Paris (of course). I had been looking for abstracts since 2011 with the idea that I could take photos that resembled paintings, but this was the first one that felt like success. It reminded of a de Staël. I had been a big fan since seeing a retrospective of his work at the Centre Pompidou in 2003.

The picture below was taken in Toronto in 2019 just about the time I started using the term Lyrical Realism. Since that first abstract, I had been looking for shot that would cut across an achictural facade making it look striped and flattened in two demensions. We had a copy on the wall for five years and I never get tired of looking at it.