Mary Bedy Photography

When you think of abstract art, does photography enter your mind at all? Or do you only think of work on paper or canvas? After all, when people in general think of photography, they think of a realistic rendering of a scene from the real world. That’s true, but I contend that a photograph can both represent something from the real world and still be an abstract representation, or at least an “abstracted” version , or a small piece of something making the image abstract by definition. I find myself drawn to abstract photography because it makes you stop and look. When I say “abstract”, I don’t necessarily mean just random shapes. I think of abstract as something depicted in a way that you would never see it in real life, or at least you would not notice in real life. Case in point - I have always enjoyed fireworks. I think they are loads of fun. When I take my camera with me to a fireworks display, I never try to capture the traditional “pretty”, perfect firework bursts. I keep the shu

Unleashed I really dislike the expression “thinking outside the box”. Whose box? What constitutes “outside the box?” Hasn’t pretty much everything been done and thought of by now? Well, maybe not technological breakthroughs that we may have never anticipated. But in this day and age of instant information, the minute we think we’ve discovered something new, it usually turns out whatever it is has either been around a long time, or someone (maybe Leonardo da Vinci) had thought of it eons ago even if it has not existed in real time and space yet. On the Court 42   I also have grown to dislike articles about photography that urge you to “think outside the box”. Generally, the advice goes something like this: Get under your subject instead of shooting it from the top. Try to get a backlit image of your subject so it’s just a silhouette. Get low to the ground so everything looks larger. Shoot a flower with the sun shining through it from behind, not with the sun directly on it. Etc. etc. Bo

After the Thaw     Art is subjective, yes, but have you even looked around you and been mesmerized by the pattern of something mundane? The odd shadow shape, the cracks in the sidewalk that look like “something” that you can’t quite name, the worn paint on the parking lot pavement. No? You’ve never noticed these things? Might I suggest you take a closer look. 9th Street 2 When I was a kid - up to the age of about 12, I was attracted to art - paintings and sculpture of all kinds, but I didn’t really like or appreciate what would be considered abstract art. Art without a defined and recognizable subject didn’t do anything for me, then I discovered Paul Klee and Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian, and I started looking at abstract art differently. These painters spoke to me. With Piet Mondrian, not so much his later works for which he is most famous, but his earlier stuff whereby he took a tree or the shape of a pier and abstracted them until they were just shapes reminiscent of the actual thing