There is something I would like to add. You'll probably find the story ridiculous, pretentious and mock me, but I would rather write this anyway. Just consider it as a note to myself.
Tom, I think that your views on photography and your public despise of "artsy farts" can only be understood when one realizes that you are an art teacher. The local academy of arts had their yearly exhibits last week and I enjoyed visiting it. From the exhibition of students' works, it was clear that part of the teaching, at least in first year, was about letting the students explore and find their own ways. I can imagine that their teachers also told them to believe in their own ways of doing things, to feel good about themselves. Or, to use your words, to believe that their penis was at least as big as anyone's else.
I suppose that your attitude about "photography as art" stems from the same mindset. Experimenting new ways is a good thing, a necessity even. If students were only told to respect art masters, there is a real risk that instead of experimenting their own ways they would just try to imitate what others have done or try to find a script leading to a good picture. There is no script leading to a good picture, obviously. Therefore students should be told to believe that they are as good as the masters (potentially), so that they develop their own styles rather than copy somebody else's success.
But OPF is not an art school. I don't think that there is much risk of anyone here starting, for example, to go out and shoot B&W landscapes on a view camera with the intent to make the eyes of the viewer move around, to paraphrase a resident artist here. There is very little risk to have a member here trying to copy a master in order to make a good picture.
Most, probably all, members here are not art students. I can't be sure about others, but I suppose that, just like me, they never had the opportunity to meet a teacher encouraging them to try their own ways. Outside of an art school, the experience that meets us is that out ways of seeing things or any experiment we can try do not interest anybody. In the world outside art schools, you are judged on your technical abilities and whether the subject of the photograph is appropriate to the viewer. If I take a picture of my sister's baby, it is a good picture to my sister and mother (and rightly so). If I take a picture of, say, a stone because I find the shape or color interesting when drawn flat in a photographic frame, it is not interesting. If I take a picture of a landscape, it is only good if it is sharp and looks like a postcard. The rules are simple, strict and never change. The internet only exacerbates this behavior, BTW: the rules to be popular on photographic sites, Flickr for example, are quite similar. I suppose that it is just how life is. And of course, there is nothing wrong with people liking postcards, they are designed to please them.
My experience with photographic courses for adults has also been similar in some ways. I quickly learned that the teachers had their own ideas of how a photograph should be. It is just that their reference were not postcards or classical portrait painting like my mother, but historical photographers. With the last teacher I met, the rules are equally simple: do something that looks like the New Topographics and it is good. Anything else is not accepted. It is not about what I may think or feel, but whether the vision meets the one the teacher has in mind.
So why the analysis of others, then? Well, even if I don't have anybody to appreciate them, I still try to take the pictures that please me from time to time. Call this a compulsion if you want. Or pretentious, it probably is. But when I watch one of my pictures I like, I don't know why it pleases me. I can't understand my own pictures, I can't deconstruct why they please me. Probably I am too close from them. But what I can do is to look for pictures by others which please me and deconstruct these. That works for me, and then I get a better feeling of why some pictures please me, including mine. I am just trying to understand. "Understand" may not be a very good word, maybe I should write "to get a better feeling about the process".
However, in one aspect you are probably right: I can analyze other peoples' pictures privately if it helps me but I should not write my analysis and post them. It is not necessary for my understanding and it bores people to death. It might even be felt as hurtful by the photographer. I should just keep these thoughts to myself, they do not belong in the forum.
