all photos ~ (embigenable)
“One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.” ~ John Szarkowski
“Finding something beautiful means conferring significance on it. Snatching it from oblivion, rescuing it, making it visible.” - Ariel Hauptmeier
“By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet....Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil.... What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.” ~ Robert Adams
“The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, endowing the act… with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.” ~ John Szarkowski
I HAVE PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED THAT I COLLECT QUOTES that tend to have relevance to my thoughts and practices, re: the making of photographs. The 4 quotes presented herein come very close to encapsulating my M.O., re: the picture making process, to wit….
…. the “art” of photography is comparable to the act of pointing cuz, in fact, one is actually pointing a picture making device at something. And, in point of fact, some of us do tend to point that device toward more interesting facts / configurations than other pointers do.
In any event, making a picture of that something essentially snatches it from oblivion and makes it visible. A print made from that encounter does indeed confer a significance on that something cuz, the picture maker is conveying to a viewer of that photograph the simple directive of “Look at this. I believe it to be of some significance.”
Now here is where it gets “tricky”…. if the picture maker performs the act of making a picture with a “special grace”––understanding and trusting their unique vision, both literal and figurative––and employs a formal rigor that identifies a work of art, he/she will most likely manage to document the form that underlies the sometime apparent chaos of the real world––although, hopefully, not at the expense of surface detail.
In the most successful results of the act of picture making, a viewer of the printed result will be uncertain how much of their pleasure and sense of enlightenment comes from the thing pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.
All of that written, my primary objective in making photographs is to document the form that underlies the apparent chaos of the real world. However, as a practitioner of straight photography, I also always strive to respect the visual integrity––as much as the medium allows––of the surface detail of the literally depicted thing(s) as seen in my pictures.
FYI, I rarely title / caption my photographs cuz most captions / titles call attention to the literally depicted referent(s) in a photograph and, to be perfectly clear, the literally depicted referent(s) in my photographs are not what pricked my eye and sensibilities and instigated my picture making activity, so why call attention to it?
Rather, once again to be perfectly clear, what pricks my eye and sensibilities is the visual possibilities of line, shape, value, color, and texture I see (quite literally see), which, when snatched from the real world, isolated and organized in a perfect––to my eye and sensibilities––frame, can be employed to create visually interesting form.
All of that written, I can unequivocally write that, if all I could do, picture making wise, was to make pictures of things, and only things, I would have traded in my picturing gear and purchased a Singer Sewing Machine a long time ago.