How can photographers help out at right now? Donating time and talent is certainly one way. But given the efforts to maintain distance between people, taking photos of and for others might not be the wisest activity at the moment. And I’m not sure how many people need or are even thinking about photos right […]
It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it. Robert Adams, Art Can Help, 9
I have been thinking a lot about how photography can do something worthwhile over the coming weeks. Or more specifically, given my good fortune to have a job that will continue through the current health crisis, I wonder how I can use my photography to do something meaningful. Is there something I can do with […]
Whenever I take a photo, it is somehow unfinished until it is a physical print. Some constellation of emotional and aesthetic preferences compels me to edit and print the image so that I can hold the photograph, and can feel its weight and the thickness of the paper. I like to look at the photograph […]
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 […]