To photograph Reality is to photograph Nothing. — Duane Michals Duane Michal’s on Tumblr
Category: Quotes
The Vanishing Pictures: David Shield’s War is Beautiful
War is horrible and we all can agree on that, yet we find ourselves in conflict after conflict after conflict in an never-ending trail of horror since the end of the second world war. Although it may now have caught up with us, and the attempt of the west to keep it off its on soil… Continue reading The Vanishing Pictures: David Shield’s War is Beautiful
On Repetition
— Excerpt from the film Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés), François Truffaut, 1962.
The Trap
Photography cannot find alternatives to depiction, as could the other fine arts. It is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of being a depiction-which-constitues-an-object. — Jeff Wall,… Continue reading The Trap
There Are Too Many Images
There are too many images. Too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was. — Robert… Continue reading There Are Too Many Images
Interesting Or Beautiful
A sunset: 78%, a landscape: 76%, a little girl playing with a cat: 56%, a woman breast-feeding: 54%, a folk dance: 46%, a weaver at work: 39%, a famous monument: 27%, a first communion: 26%, a snake: 20%, a rope 16%, a metal frame: 15%, cabbages: 12%, a butcher’s stall: 9%… a car accident: 1%… Continue reading Interesting Or Beautiful
The Gary Winogrand Problem, continued
This actually is the only question worth discussing: Why take a picture instead of not taking a picture and let it wash down the drain of all things forgotten? This mixture of apathy and the almost maniacal drive to take pictures that left Winogrand with 2000 undeveloped rolls of film and nearly 300.000 unedited… Continue reading The Gary Winogrand Problem, continued
The Garry Winogrand Problem
Modern photography, by reason of unceasing technical advance, is eminently capable of producing a mindless accumulation of automatic images, whose meaning at best is peripheral and uncertain, whose tenor at worst is dumbly exploitative and reactionary. Photographers all too frequently make pictures so conceptually casual and brainlessly superficial that their minimal meaning is exhausted at… Continue reading The Garry Winogrand Problem
The Optical Unconscious
Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through this photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. — Walter Benjamin