Shay wrote:

> 
> I have poignancy fatigue. I just can't stand it anymore. Everytime I see

> a picture of an empty alleyway, broken piece of jewelry, small room with
> a bright beam of light, 


or any type at all of zoomed in nature pic,

I think there may be more to this one, I don't think we really have 
fully processed the significance of the zoomed in nature pic.  I know 
that many who try to recreate them are not conscious of any sort of 
overarching investigation, but I am not decided yet on what the 
symbiosis between cg, especially raytracing, and various genres of 
photography might mean.  WHere the attraction actually lies.


I
> begin to feel anxious.
> 
> This is why your picture, Ron, is one of the few in this round which
> doesn't aggravate me. It doesn't try to force significance onto some
> vapid centerpiece with cheesy lighting and focus tricks.

I thought Ron's was a bold picture, but I'm not sure he did avoid cheesy 
lighting and focus tricks.  And he may very well have been shooting for 
"poignant" also.  But his style seems to recall quite effortlessly the 
look of American Scene painters, such as Bellows, and that look does 
have a certain detachment to it.  And that is what made the picture so 
successful for me.  That combination of enthusiasm for, and alienaton 
from, life as its lived and observed.
> 
> Sorry about the rant.

I think it is important input.  And you have helped me reorient some of 
my own feeling about this.  To be honest, after 25 years in New York *I* 
was suffering from *irony* fatigue.  You have given me a taste for the 
conceptual again.

I feel some of the things you feel, but I take a step back.  The basic 
paradigm of raytracing, creating a depictional space then filling it 
with objects and lighting them, is prosaic, relative to where our 
culture stands regarding the making and receiving of images.  It fosters 
  certain ways of making meaning that are a throwback to earlier eras of 
picture making. Basically its an illustrational model.  How to make a 
picture that shows such and such in order to suggest such and such. For 
me it gives me a chance to experience that brand of image making.  There 
is of course something kitchy about the whole enterprise and I am 
constantly drawn to, and can relate to, the practice of trying to use 
the new technique to mimic traditional or 'high' art.  Personally I am 
ready to just go with it and see where it leads.  But I very much 
respect what you are trying to do to put some conceptual stringency into 
the process.  I don't have much idea how to do that myself, but I think 
your experiments are very interesting and your observations valid.

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