Photography is machine art, built to manufacture an original slide or negative, designed to be a master for multiple and even unlimited copies, all looking the same as the one before. Digital produces multiple originals, or, no original at all. The art business, realizing this, has their answer in limited edition prints, limiting availability and audience, and, the built-in power of the medium which is wide distribution, getting your message and pictures out to the most folks, like the reasons behind the making of the printing press. This is a website, where digital reproduction has overtaken mechanical reproduction, with the same abilities for distribution and an even wider, larger potential audience, as well as, endless copies that are as good as an original, if one existed anymore.
My open prints, ironically, are less than the number of prints in limited eitions by the world’s best artists/photographers. Yet, as open editions thay are valued far less, although my prints are far more rare, and, are largely held in the hands and homes of the working-class and slum dwellers where i live and shoot.
Obviously, this ain’t no artist/photographer’s portfolio site, and, we don’t need no stinkin resumes, here. but actual proof.
Can a website be art? I have no idea, but RealStill is free, with no ads, no commerce and is meant to house an archive, meant to be a last will and testament, and drawn from at least one thing that’s better than art. Life, and, also, the world. If art, it’s the art of experience, even truth, that, at a minimum, captures the physical presence of things because that’s the way I operate. Art? RealStill is the epitome of the unsung, the forgotten, dome with some imagination but never reimaging, as in, reinvention or repuposing, the buzzwords of our times, the Re-Time. Along this line, is the fact that culture and its growth is entirely independent dependent upon amount of leisure and wealth in any particular country and culture. Once Ukraine was attacked, particualrly, with civilian lives and infrastructure, being exclusively targeted, in such circumstance, folks become unconcerned with cultural production over just simple survival.
What’s American? A center theme in the work, acomplished, in large part, by being hyper-local, native, with the idea of the Open Range both in the world and in the mind.
And it’s cinematic as hell, inborn to the work. Is that because i was a nutural born filmmaker, with 15 years of every day hard-core film work? And did that evaporate because my patience ran low on ethical absurdities? But fortifying the work to incrdedible levels.
Veracious culture stems from genuine things and people. It has something at stake, and is unconcerned by the nature of representation, or, someone’s relation to this thing or that. A source artist is outside overvalued IP, PC or appropriation schemes. The source is novel reality, not unique selfhood.
Too documentary for art, too art for documentary, should be the sweet spot, not a sour one.
Who goes to the source, embeds fully, lives, and works there, and lets it end there?
That’s rare and is supposed to be its value.
Cancel culture? Proving, once more, that RealStill is far ahead of the game, i self-cancelled thirty years ago. That is to say i self-cancelled for professional survival, as further idiocy and transgressions were about to do me in, since, as a source artist, form the get-go, this poisonous situation could lead to my demise. I went under by going over, through tunnels, badlands and forgotten places, even toxic zones, to protect the work, isolate myself from assholes, and, thus, ignoring their bologna, in pursuit of the source, not gossip nor who-you-know. All i know is, what i know is what i do with a camera, sound recorder and keyboard.
Of course, it’s better to become well-known and successful first, before thumbing your nose at institutions, or, better, make an entertaining successful art ridiculing things like over-valuations in the art world, like Banksy, riding all the way to the bank, and still being truthful.
Ultimately the work is the statement. It should be enough. For those who want one here’s my statement. I’ll state this – RealStill is against screens, remakes, reinvention and flipping, and is usually a debunking. RealStill is source work, and, thus, is the aesthetics of experience. While the pictures can never be real, they are artifacts. What is real, absolutely so, is everything that went into capturing the picture. Separation of church and state is a great idea because it’s an idea based on things, how about separation of art and business?