7/3/1930
(Edward Weston Daybooks)
Becking and I took an early Sunday morning walk on and near Point Lobos: the scientist and the artist coming together for the avowed purpose of getting each other’s viewpoint, on mutually exciting ground.... Becking has much of the artist in him, which the scientist of the future must have,—that is imagination: and I must have much of the scientist in me. Becking is not the narrow, onetrack-mind scientist I have exploded over: his mind is fluid, he “erects card castles to knock them down,”—as he puts it....I casually brought up the subject of evolution—in which I cannot believe...
[In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe Weston’s photography: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last another ten years].
7/3/2017
After spending some time on photo-sharing groups I find I can get overwhelmed and begin to see photography as an exercise in the feeding of images to a network for the purpose of getting likes, rather than a more rigorous art. I find that it corrupts vision, as well as the intention for taking photographs. I actually prefer going to museums and galleries to view photographs as much as possible. In museums you often see historical images, daguerreotypes, etc. that are sometimes nondescript and almost boring. Such images would get few likes on social networks, but you can really appreciate them in galleries, in context with other images in the room. Virtual reality might make gallery experiences more viable, but you still have to put on a headset, which is essentially another computer peripheral. Galleries, save for smartphone or kiosk, are absent computers.
7/3/2018
It's interesting to observe how neural networks see, which may give some insight into how other organisms see. An artist's vision is primed in certain ways, so it must be the case that the same priming is happening in dogs, birds, insects.... What machines obviously do not see are metaphors, or things that look like other things. In the absence of metadata, machinic vision sees the angles. Humans recognize other things, which manifest themselves only in language. Migratory birds use the earth's magnetic field to "see". In some ways, language is a navigational device.