9VIII said:
The missing piece here is you think that my position is totally incompatible with practical living.
No, I think your position is incompatible with reality.
9VIII said:
Self satisfaction is the only definition of success..
No it's not. Self-satisfaction is more frequently a detriment to success, not a facilitator of success.
9VIII said:
...but as soon as you make the desires of a third party part of your own definition of satisfaction, then the satisfaction of others is integral to your own.
You really don't understand creative arts do you? In the case of sponsored art (such as the Mona Lisa) the satisfaction of the client is one aspect, but it was certainly not the desire to please the client that led da Vinci to create a masterpiece. If he had merely wanted to give the client a picture that would satisfy, he could have knocked something out that would have been adequate but forgettable.
Robert Frank didn't set about to "satisfy" anyone, he set out to show Americans their country from a new viewpoint and to shake them out of their complacency and come to grips with racism and other problems. W. Eugene Smith didn't want to satisfy anyone, he wanted to expose the horrors of mercury poisoning.
Diane Arbus wasn't trying to satisfy, she was interested in forcing viewers (and herself) to confront those that society recoiled from and forcing us to reflect on our own feelings toward people's physical appearances.
Even a contemporary portraitist like Rineke Dijkstra isn't making her pictures to satisfy, but rather to challenge.
Even photographers like Edward Weston or Ansel Adams weren't seeking to satisfy, but rather to make images that spoke to the soul and, in Adams case, made statements about the importance of the natural world and its preservation.
9VIII said:
If you never have the desire to satisfy others with your work then you are absolutely correct to claim every creative work that you are satisfied with as being absolutely equal to any other image.
That's quite the non-sequitur. I suppose anyone has the right to claim anything they want. But, just as you may claim to be able to fly, if you jump off a bridge you might find your reasoning flawed as you plunge to the ground.
Your grasp of photography strikes me as incredibly self-absorbed. You find it impossible to imagine any higher purpose to photography than simply satisfying one's own ego. At the same time, you want to denigrate anyone who views photography as a personal journey in search of excellence and mastery. I find your views not merely immature and self-centered, but as a said in my first post on this thread, they represent much of what has gone wrong in society today.