Huntington Beach 4
Posted on October 30, 2002
in Photography Photos
My pictures of surfers and the waves at Huntington Beach reminded me of the debt that I and many other amateur photographers owe to
Alfred Stieglitz, particularly the series of cloud pictures that he called
Equivalents. Stieglitz pioneered the handheld camera as as artist’s tool and more: he believed in the photography like many of us believe in the InterNet, as a folk revolution which allowed the masses to create art. His
Equivalents was developed to prove to art critics that brilliant subjects were within the grasp of the ordinary photographer. Anyone with a simple lense, he believed, could create art. For this reason, I see it as fit to honor him as a kind of patron saint of the Net, of photo weblogs in particular because it is through his influence that many of us came to experiment with film and later digital photography. We owe the tremendous explosion of individual and particular visions against the homogenizing forces of the mass market and the media to a moustachioed man with a box, a lense, and film, who pointed his light trapping machine at life around him and so showed us the near occasion of things to see and share.
