Guy Tal | Photographer, Author
This is a reader-supported, ad-free zone. Please consider becoming a patron.
Don’t ask, “Is my attitude toward life the right one?”—to that question there is no answer. Every attitude is as right as every other, all are a part of life. Ask instead, “Since I am as I am, since I have these particular needs and problems which seem to be spared so many others, what... Continue Reading →
It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we know how to live in the present. —Alan Watts It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.... Continue Reading →
A new year starts today. Happy New Year! As I have in past years, I think it’s also worth noting that another year will start tomorrow, too. One also started yesterday. In fact, countless new years have started just now, during the seconds it took you to read this sentence. May they all be beautiful,... Continue Reading →
It seems to me that the most damaging restrictions on an artist’s liberty are self-imposed. So often, what may have begun as fresh thinking and discovery is turned into a routine and reduced to mere habit. Habits in thinking or technique are always stultifying in the long run. They are also contagious, and when a... Continue Reading →
To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. —Bertrand Russell This continues Remembering the Future —... Continue Reading →
I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share... Continue Reading →
Today, I share with you more thoughts on the topic of "aboutness," which I discuss in a couple of my books. As always, I offer these essays free of the annoyances of advertising and paywalls. Still, if it is within your means to contribute as little as a couple of dollars to support this blog—the... Continue Reading →
I’ll play it and tell you what it is later. —Miles Davis This is a re-edited version of an article originally published in the online magazine On Landscape. If you are not already a subscriber, I recommend it highly. (Note, this is an unsolicited, unpaid personal recommendation, not an advertisement.) ~~~ Ansel Adams spent much... Continue Reading →
To speak of “reading” a picture is appropriate but dangerous at the same time because it suggests a comparison with verbal language, and linguistic analogies, although fashionable, have greatly complicated our understanding of perceptual experiences everywhere. —Rudolf Arnheim Generalizations are dangerous things. Sweeping statements, even if true in some cases (or even if true in... Continue Reading →
Art is too complex and diverse to be explicable in terms of a single category such as the aesthetic. ‘Artistic value’ is constituted by a set of different kinds of value. The modes of appreciating art, the means to understanding art, the kinds of objects that are artworks are also all plural. —Robert Stecker There... Continue Reading →