Overnights: 6.25.21

masking and unmasking
A gathering of those who talk much, take few photos. Big cameras on big vacations for small concepts. 

It is over. Is it over. What is it.


You're already late to the wedding. There has been a divorce, and the bride has changed partners. The digital market cracked the sensor/file barrier 2012.
Lff practitioners have changed as have the main process. Digital, if output matters, dominates this group; all groups. Output is digital, input is following. Currently it is crap scan of film.

Digital has been tacked onto bellows cams since 1994. Sinar etal
Is a flex-lens, view camera enough. It has t/s & shifts. If it has 35film, is it. How bout ff sensor, but less than 20meg?
Is the size of print important; 4x5 contact, too small

The more generic this becomes, what does it have.

What did you want to do
Have you done it
Is this place a place of unique info
When horses become horsepower, does the jockey club become the stock racer club
If your medium has nothing visible to offer, does it need to remain
Are you providing a place for people with nowhere else to go. Is this a chat for the lonely
The big bit info is available in no less than 4 online fora. None of the two larger ones prohibit or restrict film or camera configuration: box or bellows welcome.

Since the info is available elsewhere, what is wanted. Control of conversation?
The 2 principal forum have changed drastically in the past 2 years. But both remain active supporters of vendors. Product releases occur along with some support from company ees. 

Will lff include b&s for sensor style equipment

Will they go, if you don't open discussion. Who will come
No. Only those who can't fit at either big dog or little boy.

A haven for those unable to contribute to the existing conversations on Lula  or getd
or the vendor support forums

Alternatives
Starting a group is costless, trivial. If they need it, they will start it.
Drop the forum portion; it seems to have more wobble than direction; time and needs have changed quickly. Look at the founders and influencers to see (hominum)
Keep static info for those who come later. Maintain a buy sell for view camera buffs

The direction seems obvious. Lff, as conceived and built has run its growth. It wasn't a perennial. It has become a hybrid. Next comes impotent stock for clippings.

Large format, largely forgotten.

Reminder: “In a New Key”

early form of finding meanings … sharing with students still finding their way across the quad.

in mind of the philosopher Susanne K. Langer and her book Problems of Art, published in 1957. In a chapter titled “Expressiveness,” Langer differentiates between “the expression of feeling in a work of art” and self-expression. For Langer, expressiveness is experience given shape and vitality through the artist’s realization of form. “What [the artist] expresses,” she writes, “is … not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling.” The jumble of life, then, is not explicated but made recognizable and whole. Langer adds that this “knowledge may actually exceed his entire personal experience.” In contrast, she brusquely likens self-expression to a crying baby. Giving precedence to the artist’s psychological disposition, self-expression surrenders the artwork’s structural logic. That such logic reinforces the aesthetic—and, yes, emotive— capabilities of a work of art is lost on those who make self-expression their métier. Cézanne, for example, may have been a cold fish, but could anyone dispute the “expressiveness” of his paintings?

Moving through the bookshelf … one book often leads to another. Too often, during lectures, I’d jump without proper attribution; without enough time between quotes, images, anything .. moving too fast for most students to move at. That was always okay to me. I slowed during techtalk, not during the important things; ideas move at the speed of art … trying for sideways meaning.

it is a peculiar fact that every major advance in thinking every epic making me new insight springs from a new type of symbolic transformation higher level of thought is primarily a new activity its course
...

Every mode of thought is bestowed on us like a gift with some new principal of symbolic expression .. Langer

EXS Bibliography:

  • Empson: ambiguity and the New Criticism.
  • Richards: rhetoric and the scientific study of literary meaning
  • Goodman
  • Langer: her exploration of symbolic logic and aesthetics in  Philosophy in a New Key [and others]

Adams, Hazard, “Langer’s New Key.” Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic. Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1983. 221-232.Schultz, William, Cassirer and Langer on Myth, 2000.