Taste
A short lesson about preferences
This is a story my father told me in 2002. I’m going to tell it in his voice.
“Over the years I’ve collected a lot of photographs, but we particularly had hundreds of Uelsmanns; so there was a point in the ‘90s when we decided we’d give away a bunch of them to the [Harn] museum. I pulled them all out and stacked them on the ping pong table downstairs, and Lorna and I decided we’d sort them into three piles: the ones that were our absolute favorites (or that we were emotionally attached to), the ones we had no problem giving away, and the “not sure” stack in-between.
“And we started going through them. We were incredibly methodical. And after a short time we had three almost-equal stacks on the table. And we left them there and turned off the lights.
“Things being as they are, it took a while before I got things lined up at the Harn, maybe a year. The photos remained undisturbed on the table until we returned. But when we looked, it was amazing: we couldn’t tell which pile was which!”
I think about this often. Yes, Uelsmann’s photos have a lot going on, so there are atypical ways that his images grow on you or…
