240 New Pictures to Look At
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The writings and teachings of the Baha’i faith motivate and inspire my photography. I am a Baha’i. My faith gives meaning to my life and infuses it with beauty and inspiration. Even when I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be an artist but later on failed to pursue my ambition. During a brief period that lived in Chicago, I visited the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette many times. I bought my first camera to take pictures of it. |
Some of my images of the temple in Wilmette offer unique views from upper balconies where tourists seldom go and the very top on the outside of the building where almost nobody is ever allowed to go.
| I have replaced all but two of the images that were on my website and added more than 80 new images that I haven’t exhibited before. The replacements are the result of rescanning and post processing about half of my photo library of 500 images. These are the majority of the images that survived a disastrous flood and that I chose to save. |  |
This article is a continuation of the four-part series that began with Through a Scanner Brightly.
The Gallery Catalog page asks a question taken from the movie Finding Neverland and poses an answer that I hope will resonate with you.
Did you like it?
It was magical.
Thank you.
Related posts
An Afternoon With Monet
In the writings of the Baha’i Faith we read: “I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in this wonderful new age, art is worship. The more thou strivest to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal could be greater than this, that one’s art should be even as the act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers grasp the paint brush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the Temple.” (‘Abdu’l-Baha)
How often have you seen a contemporary soft-focused photograph that was designated as “impressionist” by the photographer or a magazine editor? So-called impressionist photography is a recurring theme in mass market magazines. Does blurring a photograph by using a diffusion or fog effects filter make it impressionist or is it just kitsch?
kitsch n. “Sentimentality or vulgar, often pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts.”
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism comes a definition we can work with plus a bit of history. Renoir, Degas, and Monet did not use soft focus filters. Degas was an avid photographer.
The rise of the impressionist movement can be seen in part as a reaction by artists to the newly established medium of photography. The taking of fixed or still images challenged painters by providing a new medium with which to capture reality. Initially photography’s presence seemed to undermine the artist’s depiction of nature and their ability to mirror reality. Both portrait and landscape paintings were deemed somewhat deficient and lacking in truth as photography “produced lifelike images much more efficiently and reliably”. (wikipedia)
In spite of this, photography – actually inspired artists to pursue other means of artistic expression, and rather than competing with photography to emulate reality, artists focused “on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph – by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated”. The Impressionists sought to express their perceptions of nature, rather than create exacting reflections or mirror images of the world. This allowed artists to subjectively depict what they saw with their “tacit imperatives of taste and conscience”. Photography encouraged painters to exploit aspects of the painting medium, like colour, which photography then lacked; “the Impressionists were the first to consciously offer a subjective alternative to the photograph”. (wikipedia)
The main influences on my art are Monet and Kandinsky. That may seem difficult to reconcile but it works for me. For an example see “Light Beams and Symbolism” and “Flowers On The Sun.”
A sunrise by Claude Monet, 1872
Claude Monet: Soleil Levant (from Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression%2C_Sunrise
“My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.” – Claude Monet
A greatly enlarged detail from one of my photographs. This image was not manipulated in Photoshop in any way except to selectively modify large areas of color. This is the texture of the original 35 mm slide after some darkroom manipulations during development.
Greatly enlarged detail. (C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
These images are part of a series I made called Afternoon With Monet In My Head. Like most of my images the sun was directly behind the birds which accounts for their luminosity.
Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning. — Jacques Barzun
Here are a few quotations about art and artists from the Baha’i writings:
Compilation on the Arts. Visit the Downloads Page for additional similar documents.
