Personally, I'm not much of a fan of photography as an art form. I'm unsure why, but I much prefer other visual art forms such as painting, drawing, digital art, and sculpture. However, seeing John Wood's work at the International Center for Photography changed my view on photography, placing it higher up in my visual arts hierarchy.

 

One piece that really stood out for me especially, that made me rethink my views on photography as an art form, was "Gun Landscape: Daisies” because of how much it could be analyzed. I had an idea beforehand of it being a representation of war and peace, the daisies reminding me of the flower power movement around the time the photo collage was made. However, I didn’t consider some other significant aspects such as that the piece was actually a negative.

 

I was wondering why he would do that, but I found that using the negative of the image was a common theme in John Wood’s photography. I personally thought that it would be to make the viewer look at the world from a different lens (joke intended) but truthfully, that’s only a guess, and I don’t know for sure why John Wood would use the negative so frequently. I also thought about what it would look like if the negative was made into a positive and how different it would be. Imagining that, I found it to look odd, but maybe that’s because I’m used to the first image.

 

I felt that John Wood knew perfectly well what he was doing and that every aspect of the photo montage was deliberate and carefully thought out. Now, I think that a good photographer in general knows what he is doing and plans out all the aspects from the subject to the manipulation of the photo. Now I think that there is just as much skill involved in making, for what is the artist, the ideal photograph as it is for painting a painting, creating a sculpture, or creating another visual art item.