Nominal
“Basically, what you really want to do is try to engage the viewer's body relation to his thinking and walking and looking, without being overly heavy-handed about it.”
-- Richard Serra
McFarlane, Robert. “Stripping down to the bare minimum.” Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) 10 May 2000, late ed.: pg. 14.
Robert McFarlane is a documentary photographer, specializing in social issues and documenting performance within film and theatre. He is also a writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, B + W magazine as well as a few others. In his article McFarlane critiques several shows in the Sydney area, many of which claim to be minimalist. One show that seems particularly interesting is titled Minimal and is curated by Alasdair Foster. The show conists of works by nine photographers, and Foster draws comparisons between music and photography, stating “minimalism has inflected (sic) .. avant-garde film scores and popular music, [whereas] photography has been obsessed with detail and ... the medium of evidence". As McFarlane critiques various artists from various galleries, questioning whether or not their work is really minimalist. McFarlane eventually comes to the conclusion after dissecting the artist’s work that “Photography pure and simple, epic and contrived, fills out what is an unusually dense month of exhibitions in Sydney.”
Reading this article was interesting to me, because I was able to see into the eyes of an experienced photo critic, and understand from his point of view what constitutes minimal photography, and if the minimalist style is always justified in its use. While my work is certainly not classified as minimalist photography, I am hoping that if executed correctly, it will have a minimalist feel, perhaps in the attention to detail.
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