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40 Expose a whole roll of film on one subject; a person, place, thing, group of things.§§§§§ It is commonplace to think that photographing involves finding something interesting, taking a picture of it, putting away the camera until something else interesting is noticed, taking a picture of that, and so on. This may not be the most profound use of the medium. There is a photograph by Andre Kertész of a fork resting on the edge of a plate. The fork casts a shadow. That’s all there is. The picture is transformative. There are hundreds of examples of this in the history of art. Who cares about the apples in Cezanne’s pictures or even the particulars of Van Gogh’s postman. In art, it’s not so much the object depicted, but rather what happens when it is transformed through a medium by a particular artist’s sensibility. This is not such an easy thing to learn in photography because the medium encourages literalness by its very nature. If and when I get a sense of why a simple Korean ceramic vessel, or the sound of Lester Young playing the melody of a popular song on a scratched record, can be among the highest forms of human expression, then I am beginning to discover what ‘art’ is. I certainly cannot do this with my rational mind alone. Something else in me is beginning to function at these moments. EXERCISE #5 FIRST ASSIGNMENT ...

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