A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless. John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, 25.
In 1974 Susan Sontag published her “Shooting America,” which included a critique of Bob Adelman’s Down Home and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Along with Sontag’s reflections on documentary photographers’ predilection for the poor, she comments on the growing preference for “raw unliterary record” in both photography and writing. The emerging literary taste for “unedited […]
Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 10.
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. … In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography, 6.
The gesture of photography is different from the gestures of the other visual arts; I hope to show that photography is no less complex, difficult, and visual. Indeed, my belief is that in many ways fine photography is more purely intellectual, purely visual, because the gestures involved are less connected to hand gestures but much […]
I make pictures when I can, like other latter-day explorers who work during the week.… No important mandate to chart some vanishing wilderness subsidizes these outings, and even a short drive into the land can become an adventure. Weekend exploration may not be what it used to be, but it’s a compelling act nonetheless. Mark […]
The images I take generally are not a precise pictorial representation of what my eye see. They’re usually devoid of color for a start off and sometimes they’re even more abstract, hinting at but not fully describing the true nature of the landscape that I’m photographing. Steve Gosling (website)
As photographers, we do not just set out to “capture” an image on film. Rather, as Alfred Stieglitz said, we can use the medium to create an equivalent to the experience of what we see and feel when making a photograph. John Sexton, Listen to the Trees (Boston, 1994), 84.
Photography for me is a creative art. It is not simply an illustrative or interpretive medium.… I try, not always with success, to photograph only what stimulates a recognition of beauty, either that which is intrinsic in the objects of nature or is a manifestation of the wonderful relationships of things in the natural world. […]
My photographs are meditations on the light that illumines and transforms the ordinary, the often overlooked. There are those rare moments when the everyday reality of our world is transcended and one glimpses the eternal and infinite. Marion Patterson, Grains of Sand (Palo Alto, 2002), xi.