Hmm, actually I wasn’t sure what “the matter” might be, which is why I made the post in the first place. As you seem to know, could you pretty please explain what the matter actually is?
Here is what prompted me to make this post with its rather diverse set of links to images - and please note I wasn’t particularly interested in the text surrounding most of the images:
@Stampede posted his play raw for Women’s legs through a scrim - Abstract Photography. His image brought to mind several things:
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The use of a cloth scrim and the angle made by the lady’s very straight legs reminded me of Adolf de Meyer’s wonderful image Glass and Shadows.
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The outlines and gradual alteration of tone and color across the lady’s legs was oddly reminicent of similar outlines and tonal transitions in many of O’Keeffe’s abstracts and flowers.
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The lady in @Stampede’s photograph perhaps was holding a yoga pose and seemed very athletic. I was wondering how much effort it took for her to hold that particular pose - some yoga-trained individuals can hold such poses for a long time.
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The title of the post suggested the image is intended to be an abstraction. But as one person commented in the play raw thread, the image didn’t seem all that abstract, or rather, speaking for myself I wasn’t sure what aspect of reality it was an abstraction of.
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As O’Keeffe’s paintings had already crossed my mind, I went to the library and checked out a book she wrote, in which she gives an awesome explanation of “abtract”, the quoting of which hopefully falls under “fair use”:
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint (text on the page facing Plate “88 Dark Abstraction, 1924” in the book “Georgia O’Keeffe” by Georgia O’Keeffe, The Viking Press, NY, copyright 1976; Penguin edition copyright 1977).
I think what O’Keeffe says is a good summary of what we try to do as photographers: We already abstract from reality by virtue of composing, lighting, and framing a scene, and sometimes we abstract considerably further resulting in less immediately recognizable “real stuff”, which clearly @Stampede was doing with his photograph.
Presumably our goal when taking photographs is to clarify by the resulting image something that we saw and responded to, that prompted the desire to take the photograph in the first place. That “something” doesn’t necessarily have to be, almost surely can’t be, expressed adequately using words. But surely words can help in explaining the whats and whys of a given image.
So in this sense I guess all photographs and all paintings are abstract, though some are a lot more abstract than others in the sense of “how abstracted from recognizable stuff”. And surely some abstractions speak more powerfully and plainly than others. Also the “thing in [one]self” (as O’Keeffe puts it) that prompts the reaction that led to the photograph surely does vary from one photograph and photographer to the next.
Anyway, while trying to figure out what the abstracted reality might be in @Stampede’s photograph, I started thinking about photographs of naked people that I had seen in the past and liked, including a series of black and white images of women around a dinner table. Try searching the internet using search terms like “naked”, “women”, and “eating dinner” - a lot of odd stuff shows up! - did you know that there are restaurants where people take off their clothes before sitting down to eat? But finally I remembed, “Oh, the women were eating spaghetti”, which led to the actual photographs and also to a photograph of a person who had covered herself with spaghetti and take a selfie.
Other portrayals of naked/nude people came to mind starting with Imogen Cunningham. Tracking these images down on the internet likewise turned up a lot of stuff I wasn’t particularly looking for, some of which provided interesting counterpoints to the stuff I was looking for.
In the process I did figure out a bit about why I dislike most nake/nude/fashion photography: totally vacuous facial expressions.