soCurio | art is for everyone

I became interested in art at a very young age when my parents dragged me to the art institute in Chicago to see an Henri Matiese exhibition. We sat through the lecture and then walked the exhibition. I was mesmerized and loved it. I\\\'ve always had a very special place in my heart for the Art Institute from that day. I ended up going to school in Chicago for a couple of years at the U of Ill circle campus where I started with photography. I later found out that the art department there was much influenced by the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology which in turn was the American incarnation of the German Bauhaus school of arts and crafts. I became interested in photography because of one teacher Hans Schau, who decreed photography as a medium to manipulate the variables. I began to see photography as a wide range of variables to manipulate. I also took in and was influenced by other great Chicago Photographers: Harry Callahan, Arron Siskind, Arthur Siegal and later Ken Josephson. Each of them gave me something to admire as much as the Matisses I saw years before them. Through these photographers I saw that photography could be great art, giving you that same emotional charge that a great painting could bring you. After moving to New York City, I became interested in the Conceptualist movement at the time and saw how the depth of manipulating the variables could go deeper and how others were using it in writing a new language with it. I still enjoy photography as a sense of play manipulating variables. I\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'m at a curious crossroad these days. Because of a stroke I had last year I am limited as to the photography I can do. I\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'ll put my digital Nikon on a tripod and shoot around the house that way. My most recent stuff has been photographing water arcs I make in the Kitchen sink. I haven\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'t shown any of this yet because I need to do more of it to see if there is anything in it. I have also purchased a Leica d-lux P&S which is a great little camera I\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'m able to use with my operable hand. Again its great fun to play with and keeps me thinking about photography. But alas I\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'m not able to get around and walk the streets of NYC and shoot so I\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'m doing alot of reading about photography, what it means, the semiotics of what exists in a photograph and how all this will inform me of the pictures I will be making in the future. Again manipulate the variables and look for the beauty in what is possible from looking through a camera, collecting that beauty, categorise it and seeing if there is true beauty or just fads and trends.