Early in my photography ”career” I had great doubts about abstract work. I just felt that photographs should be transparent, i.e. it should be instantly obvious what the photograph was about. Abstracts were way too fluffy and I tended to avoid them. But then as my photographic vision started to form, I started making some experiments with abstracts and I suddenly found myself at home with them. I like it when a picture is stripped of everything unnecessary and it doesn’t often get more stripped than in an abstract.
An abstract photograph is an intellectual challenge for me while an abstract painting normally has to be approached on an emotional level – well, that’s at least what I remember from my art lesson back at school when our art teacher had us look at an abstract painting. All I could see was white canvas, black lines and some coloured blobs, while the teacher saw a great piece of art and a rainbow scale of emotions. So I have a tendency to rationalise my art and when a rational approach leaves me wanting, there’s not much left in the photograph for me too look at. In other words, in order for a photograph to reach my emotional level at all, it has to pass the technical filter first.
The way I see it, abstract photography goes hand in hand with minimalism. A minimalistic picture contains a minimum of elements while still being recognisable, while an abstract can at least momentarily make you wonder exactly what you’re looking at. In the natural world, an abstract image is almost by necessity also minimalistic because abstract art should ”exist independently of visual references to the world”. A painter can create something that doesn’t exist, but a photographer has to create on the terms of the natural world. In order to do that with nature photography, you really have to get creative and I reckon the macro specialists have the upper hand here while landscape photographers are out of luck.
I once called snow the ”big equaliser”, meaning that snow covers all distractions in the landscape, making it easy to compose a minimalistic landscape photograph or an abstract close-up (or black&white, another style I often struggle with). That’s just another reason for me to love winter! With that in mind, I have put together a gallery on my snow pictures, found on minnak.net.