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So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.
"It is light that reveals, light that obscures, light that communicates. It is light I "listen" to. The light late in the day has a distinct quality, as it fades toward the darkness of evening. After sunset there is a gentle leaving of the light, the air begins to still, and a quiet descends. I see magic in the quiet light of dusk. I feel quiet, yet intense energy in the natural elements of our habitat. A sense of magic prevails. A sense of mystery. It is a time for contemplation, for listening - a time for making photographs. "
Photography was increasingly being seen as something outside the art world. As a sort of illustration. They just fired the director of photography at the Sunday Times Magazine - that's where everyone went with their photo essays in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. It was the place to get published. It is an issue. And I feel it. There's no budget. The budget-holders are very often people who've been to the professional colleges where art is not taught. So art as a part of education is something that's missing - since Thatcher's day, anyway.
The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me… the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.
There was as big a reaction after the revelations about Assad's chemical weapons. Nevertheless, that photograph did strike a singular chord. Which leads us to a larger fact: we don't understand why certain photographs create such an upheaval in one's soul. You look at them and go, "Oh my gosh." And that doesn't happen with television. It's unique to photography. Photographs are unique in that they are a frame abstracted out of reality, out of, in this case, a civil war. A single event can carry so much weight. And that is extraordinary.
The fact is that the camera is literal if anything, which gives it something in common with a thermometer... Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty. There is sleight of hand in photography... you make the viewer think he's seeing everything while at the same time you make him realize he's not. I try to make my pictures seem reasonable and then, at the last minute, pull the rug from beneath the viewer's feet, very gently so there's a little thrill.
Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.
I think photography is so hard. To be working in video and photography the past 20 years - because I was doing it in high school - you're dealing with mediums that change culture. The way they are distributed, disseminated - it's changed so dramatically. One of the things I always like to do is look at the structure of something and detach myself from the structure and figure out how to slightly alter it. So if the structure itself is constantly liquidated, it just really is difficult for me to really even know what to think of Instagram.
Every once in a while I have this revelation like, "Wow, a hundred years ago the world wasn't black and white." It was in color. Photographed in a certain way, people look from another time. We are just not used to seeing ourselves in that context. Something that's fascinating about photography is you can isolate a moment, tear it out of its context, and see it afresh. Another realization is that, "Wow, there's a big world out there, and people are still doing all sorts of the things that they used to do." We don't just live in iPad land.
More and more are turning to photography as a medium of expression as well as communication. The leavening of aesthetic approaches continues. While it is too soon to define the characteristic of the photographic style today, one common denominator, rooted in tradition, seems in the ascendancy. The direct use of the camera for what it can do best, and that is the revelation, interpretation, and discovery of the world of man and of nature. The greatest challenge to the photographer is to express the inner significance through the outward form.
The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.
The magazine business is dying. It's a hard time for publishing. It does seem that everyone is much more opinionated now. I think there's probably more room for making opinionated illustrations. There was a time when Time magazine and Newsweek would have a realistic painted cover. A friend of mine used to do a lot of those paintings and he was told by the art director at one point, we are switching to photography. It seems that if someone saw a painting on a cover, it took a while to do, it must be old news. Photography became more immediate.
I think I’ve said this before many times—that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable — it is too interesting. And it isn’t always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life.
Some day there may be... machinery that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o'er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods - in short, a machine that will discriminately select its subject and, by means of a skillful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print, and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will be nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition and gratefully to receive the 'Royal Medal'.
Photography, precisely because it can only be produced in the present and because it is based on what exists objectively before the camera, takes its place as the most satisfactory medium for registering objective life in all its aspects, and from this comes its documental value. If to this is added sensibility and understanding and, above all, a clear orientation as to the place it should have in the field of historical development, I believe that the result is something worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.
As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.
Books on scientific photography with such beauty, breadth, and insight are rare. Felice Frankel's Envisioning Science is chock full of mind-boggling images and valuable information--not only for curious artists, students, and lay people, but also for seasoned researchers and photographers. The eclectic Frankel is both a scientist and photographer, and with the cold logic of the one and the inspired vision of the other, she covers an array of topics sure to stimulate your imagination and sense of wonder at the incredible vastness of the physical world.
The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists.
Critics are giving marks for originality, acting, photography and scripting, while mass audiences are more drawn to familiarity of genre, stars they would like to have sex with or plots that are more likely to make their dates have sex with them. Reviewers are doing their day's work, cinema-goers are escaping from theirs: this leads to an inevitable difference of response. It is, though, wrong to conclude that reviewers are completely useless. Books, movies and shows may be critic-proof, but the egos and psyches of the people who make them very rarely are.
To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world. Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today. The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will, but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.
The dismal half-baked images of the average "reportage" and "documentary" photography are self dammning... the slick manner, the slightly obscure significance, the esoteric fear of simple beauty for its own sake - I am deeply concerned with these manifestations of decay. Gene Smith's work validates my most vigorous convictions that if the documentary photographs is to be truly effective it must contain elements of art, intensity, fine craft and spirituality. All these his work contains and we may turn to his work with gratitude, appreciation and great respect.
This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.
I've had my body manipulated so many different times for so many different reasons, whether it's paparazzi photographers or for film posters. The topless Interview shoot was one of the ones where I said: 'OK, I'm fine doing the topless shot so long as you don't make them any bigger or retouch.' Because it does feel important to say it really doesn't matter what shape you are. I think women's bodies are a battleground, and photography is partly to blame. Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.
I never had any intention nor interest in being an artist, but when I made work I realized that this was my language. What I had to say needed to be said in this way. I always loved taking photographs - but never considered myself a photographer. I have tremendous respect for photographers. I do use a camera and a photo as a basis for a lot of my work, but I use it as a means to attain an image to work from. The actual photography in my work is a monochromatic photograph. I'll photograph something and extract a color that will then be the background for a painting.
The original interest in making pictures that don't directly depict came around '97 or '98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me.
Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.
I left film because I felt that photography was my art. It was something I could do on my own, whereas film was so collaborative. I thought as a photographer I could make something that was artistic and that was mine, and I liked that. And it wasn't until I got back into film and I have very small crews and I could do very tiny filmmaking that wasn't 100 people that I still felt that I was making something artistic as a filmmaker. So, you know, I'm an artist, and whether it's photography or film, I want my voice to be there and I think my voice is very strong in this film.
Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.
Newspaper photographs nowadays are highly tautologous. You'll have an article about, say, stopping the war. And the photograph that will be used is literally a poster that reads "Stop The War." Or you'll have a story about a cash crisis in Barcelona, and the only picture you'll see is an ATM in Barcelona. The problem is actually systemic. On the one hand, you'll have a picture of a soda can to "illustrate" an article about the dangers of sugary drinks. On the other hand, anything that's reasonable in documentary photography is snapped up by the art world and we never see it.
Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.