Progressive-Street has opened a new place for photographers:
A place where we look for images that make the difference.
Images that communicate moods, images that are beautiful but not cloying.
We are not looking for beautiful women, pretty flowers, sunsets or enchanting landscapes.
We seek soul, joy, and pain.
We seek perfect imperfection.
Screams, uneasiness, happiness.
Manipulations are accepted.
This is not simply about the perfection of the photographic technique.
It’s more than that.
In some instances, the photograph alone may be the art.
In others, it’s the start point or driving force within the resulting art.
The images must have been by design:
Perhaps part of projects; that express a personal research by the photographer.
We do not want accidental shots masked with over processing.
A small magazine is born. Sometimes monographic, sometimes collective, with no fixed deadline.
ART OF IMPERFECTION, SUBTRACTION AND SDEFINITION
art is dead.
conceptually deprived of its obligation to exist.
empty argumentations. useless dissertations. despairing gibberish.
the artist, however, will never die.
the artist is he/she who cannot do anything else but what he/she does:
to abstract and to express abstraction with whatever he/she finds around him/her.
the outsider, not by choice but in spirit.
the person who isn’t here or there.
the storyteller.
the ineffective.
- the importance of sdefinition:
we live in the future, where everything has already been said and done;
sometimes not experienced.
- the importance of the subtraction:
we live in the future, where the superfluous goes beyond the surplus value.
- the importance of the imperfection:
we live in the future, where the “decorative” (perfection) has smeared life.
state of incessant imperfection
nothing lasts, nothing is complete, nothing is perfect.
as wabi-sabi (in Kanji: 侘寂) [侘 (wabi) and 寂 (sabi)], the Japanese aesthetics based on the transience of all things, which in turns derives from the Buddhist doctrine of anitya (Sanskrit, Japanese, mujō), which means impermanence.
beauty is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.
the “artistic product” is that, which has been crafted, as well as that, which the artistic gesture has not completed.
and exactly this lack, this absence, is what’s important.
to listen to some treatise on the artist’s thought process is not of interest; maybe, if they explain it over a cup of coffee, that’s acceptable.
an “artistic product” is made of contingencies, chance, truth, centering
it is different for everyone: you either like it or you don’t. it tells you something or it leaves you cold. it makes you angry. it provokes. it gives you enthusiasm. it does not affect you. it is. it has its own life. it does not belong to the artist anymore.
Batsceba Hardy
Thursday 04.23.20