How do I see photography and why

A piece of art, whether it's a poem, painting, play, photo or whatever that it is, in the end aside from all that it is, it is also an object that shows itself to you. My favorite medium is a photo mainly because of the rules of engagement that I think is only right to apply to them. When I look at a photo, I don't look at what the photo is about. I try to reconstruct the surroundings of that photo. I love how the focus of camera man on one point, reveals something about his decisive ignorance on everything else in that area. To me, it's those things that are not in the photo that make up the feeling that I would then take away from an image. If I look at something...and can't think of surroundings...I conclude that I am looking at a good picture since I am already in the surroundings...and it so happens that those pictures, no matter what camera, are most lively ones to me, and often times the photographer too.

People have a concept of understanding art. That's why there are phrases like "I don't get this painting", "I don't understand what this poem is talking about" or "what the hell that music is about?" It seems like when confronted with a poem or a painting or any other art, we first form a framework that looks at the painting as if it has be about something. Of course, many arts indeed are about something and that only makes them the more valuable. What I mean is that an whether an art-form is about something or not, its artistic nature is not embedded in what the art-form is actually about. The feeling of a poem is not in what the poem is about, it is about what it feels like. So what I just said is: The feeling of a poem is in what it feels like. It sounds trivialized...but it's actually not...

When you approach a painting or read a poem, you should actually put some effort to avoid from thinking in frameworks that limit feeling that painting. It takes mental energy, just like how that design question takes mental energy. The effort here is to keep an open mind, this time literally. Once you do care hard enough to put the effort of avoiding frameworks impose your own thinking on the art, any good art will quickly show itself to you through stimulating your senses. It may provoke a feeling, or stimulate an emotion, or make a memory vivid.

Accordingly, I see the role of artist as twofold. First is that the artist should develop his/her medium of communication so that once a genuine feeling, emotion worth sketching comes to mind the hands are ready to start working, or the words are ready to flow. In other words, artist must develop the ways to be able to express him/herself with ambiguity and quickly to be able to capture his experience of something in words/images as genuine as possible. The second thing is what an artist should not do, and this despite it's negative connotation requires more active energy and thought than the former one. The artist should not fall prey to developing the perfect tools of expression to impose awe. In my case, my most memorable poems are hardly ever the ones that is has the best structure. Even in my writing pieces...I wrote something in Farsi about our trip to Ottawa to vote. The text is overflowing with grammatical and spelling problems...but I had managed to refuse changing it, I like how the genuine frustration, and hopelessness feeling of the moment is further captured with the small error almost running everywhere as you read through.