I know you kinda encourage honesty here on your blog so here goes ;)

I do normally appreciate your photography, and am a regular visitor, however I do find your photographs of other peoples art quite, well..suprising. Controversial?

I think if the pot was included with the surrounding area etc, then it would be a different story. However close-ups of other peoples art seem to be just that...a photo of someone else's work.

I kinda feel like it would be like me taking a photo of your photo, a close up, so nothing else, just your photo, and putting it on my blog and claiming it as my own. However, if I took a photo of someone looking AT your photographs, then it would be a different story.

But thats just me..thats how I feel about it. ;) I hope you dont mind my honesty ;) And I hope I made sense! LOL. I also want to add, that there are many folk who take photos of other peoples art, so Im not just targetting you, I just have always felt its a very weird thing to do. There are artists who actually make art from other peoples art...Recycled Art..ha! So Im sure they would send me packing!

Jinky: I know what you mean about shots of other people's art but that isn't really what I was focusing on here, or at least my intention wasn't to focus on it. For me this shot is about two things.

First: it's about decay - the erosion of the face as it gradually peels away from the pot and the stark contrast between this natural entropy and the obvious strength of expression in the face. So I guess I intended this shot to say something about the human condition.

Second: the original depicts nature ( my first title for this shot was "the face of nature") but I always found it a bit harsh - a bit too "shiny" perhaps. However, in its gentle disintegration it has gradually become a part of that which it depicts - much more "natura"l perhaps.

So the fact that this is someone else's work was incidental to my intention.

Anyway, we're moving in a few hours, after which I wont have any access to chromasia for a couple of days, but I would be interested to continue this discussion. What does everyone else think about this?

Dave,

I'm glad I talked to you before starting my amateur photography hobby this past weekend. After calling over 50 local camera stores around Los Angeles for the G5, I finally found a store that carried it! It's been helping me do some wonders the last few hours.

Anyway, onto your shot. the first impression I got was that it was a giant mural painting, not a pot. I'm quite lost in its eyes and face. For a second, it looks to be a "real" person.

I don't have a problem at all if anyone takes a picture of someone else's work, as long as that person acknowledges his/her viewers where the photo came from, like how you did.

I wish you the best of luck with your moving, and hopefully you will be able to come back in the future to visit your old friends.

P.S. If anyone decides to look at my photo site that I just started, I just want to let you know that although I had the idea of the design before I saw Dave's site, I was influenced to change a bit of it from seeing Chromasia. So I just want to make it obvious that I give Dave a lot of credit for not only his advice, but also the style of this site. Thank you.

I hope I havnt scared everyone off! Dave I can understand where your coming from.

i really like this image.. the brown that's become visible thru peeling works well with the greens and gives an extra dimension to the face. I put a photo of a grafittied eye on my photoblog a while back where pigeons had transformed the original picture with their droppings. I think that graffiti and outdoor art in general changes rapidly with time and can look very different in different lightings... something that a camera can preserve ..and a photoblog can share to many outside that neighbourhood..

i don't think i would have known this was a pot if you hadn't mentioned it. i thought initially that i t was some sort of mural too. i love shots like this, discarded pieces of someone's or society's past.

as for taking pictures of someone else's art, i think it depends on what the piece is and how they do it. i love seeing pictures of signs or old advertisements(or even new advertisements), especially when it's something not too obvious. i see those kind of shots more as a document of those things, not so much of the photographer's skill. though sometimes they can be both.

Thanks everyone. As for the issue of other people's art: I guess it's easy to demarcate some things as art, and feel as though we should justify "re-packaging" them as photography, but not others. For instance: we don't feel the need to acknowledge the architect of a building, the graphic artist who designed the logo we just photographed, or the designer of a particular model of car. In these instances it wouldn't occur to us to mention their artistic input.

"Art", however, is more immediately linked to an artist and we naturally feel as though we should acknowledge their creative effort. All of which doesn't really address any of the issues outlined above other than that I think this shot is more to do with interpreting this scene than simply representing it.