“John Szarkowski has used the expression “nominal subject matter”. I think that’s perfect for my behavior here. I am not interest in gas stations or anything about gas stations. This happens to be an excuse for seeing.… I don’t care if it was about a gas station or if this is a rubber raft or if this is a crappy little house. That’s not my subject! The gas station isn’t my subject. It’s an excuse for a place to make a photograph”….
…. “I take a picture of the subject and its context––the subject as it stands with everything else…. I’m trying to make an atonal photograph where everything is as important as everything else…. I think it’s possible to make a photograph in which the photographer lays back enough so the viewer comes into the photograph and has a chance to perceive the thing on his own terms, instead of only seeing what the photographer has hooked him to see. I think one of the reasons I’m using the 8x10 camera is that I felt I could work with the large camera and make photographs in which the subject was everything in the frame.” ~ Joel Meyerowitz
I RECENTLY WROTE THAT I DO NOT TITLE MY photographs onaccounta I do not wish to call attention to the literally depicted referent in my pictures cuz my pictures are rarely “about” the literally pictured referent. As an adjunct to that practice, at an exhibit of my photographs I have always wished for red velvet ropes strung 3-4 feet in front the gallery walls to prevent viewers from sticking their noses where they don’t belong––that is, so close to a picture that they can not see the print in its entirety. That’s cuz seeing the print in the all together is the only way in which a viewer can actually see what my pictures are about.
My “excuse” for making a photograph is the potential I see in isolated––by means of framing––sections of the quotidian world to create visually interesting form; form that results from the fact that everything within my frame is as important as everything else within the frame. In other words, creating visually interesting form is my subject, aka: what my photographs are about. It is not about the literally depicted things in my photographs.
FYI, if I were to title any of the above photographs, the titles might be something like; my son wearing a new hat, or, my grandson eating lunch at the Statue of Liberty, or, my daughter and her cousins reading on the beach. However, for the life on me, I just can not imagine how those titles would improve, in any manner, a viewer’s reaction to / appreciation of / understanding of the pictures. In fact, iMo, the titles might very well lead a viewer to think that that information had something to do with why I made the pictures which, in fact, had absolutely nothing––nada, zero, zip––to do with why I made the pictures.