During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable.
A meaningful conceptual basis is always more important than vivid photographs, and vice versa.
Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years.
Time past cannot be stopped, saved, or regained. But a photograph allows you to borrow it.
Photographs should celebrate the contingent, the spontaneous, the incomplete, the fortuitous. Direct, unblinking vision should be coupled with deliberate indifference as to subject. The ironic goal is a scrupulous recording of whatever chance brings to hand.
... if [a photograph is] unbelievably real it becomes superreal or another kind of super real, better than real... [it] also can be, I think, so heartfelt that you almost can get a pang of compassion for the thing.
I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.
I work in several different groups of pictures which act on and with each other - ranging from several abstracted manners to a form for the surreal. I have been called a preacher - but, in reality, I'm more generally philosophical. I have never made an abstracted photograph without content. An educated background in Zen influences all of my photographs. It has been said that my work resembles, more closely than any photographer, Le Douanier Rousseau - working in a fairly isolated area and feeding mostly on myself - I feel that I am a primitive photographer.
I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person.
[My work] includes something about death, and about love, because the photos always have something to do with death. The photograph is like taxidermy. It is like the animals I use. They are posed in order to appear to be alive, but they are dead. Their time has passed. The photos have to do with time and loss, and conclusion.
The familiar photographs that many people carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word.
Photography is linked with death in many different ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of loved beings who are no longer alive. But there is another real death which each of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer to our own death. Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished.
I never wanted to make portraits - to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations.... I have always been interested in everyman - average, ordinary people in everyday situations.
The collection of photographs is a statement about the relationship of my camera and me.
Merging photographs can be more real than the isolated image because reality is so much more rich than just an isolated moment.
The photograph as an objective representation of reality simply does not exist. The photograph does not explain to you what is going on to the left or to the right or above or below the frame. Oftentimes, it doesn't even explain to you what is going on inside the frame.
Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.
A photograph is analogous to a plaster cast taken from life, which is always inferior to a good statue.
It's important to me to have what I photograph undergo a certain transformation - to become a thing different from what we are used to, to be another version of itself.
The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive. I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.
A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.
I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn't considered before.
... my father loved to take photographs of me. When I was nine I made my own costumes for a school play and I experienced becoming different characters. I loved to document myself as different images and I think my work evolved after this favorite activity. The photographs I exhibited in New York juxtaposed reality and fantasy. There was everyday life and fantasy was dismantling that reality.
If you were to ask me to define a photograph in a few words, I would say it is a fossil of light and time.
Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph.
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