May 2011
“I do. Going off on your own all over the place with a camera to photograph people. On your own, with nobody else, drifting by, drinking and smoking and hanging out with a camera round your neck and shooting off a couple of rolls or whatever the digital term is now. It doesn’t really matter if it’s street, war, documentary, commercial or fashion. That’s what it’s all about really. Getting into your own little world.”
—Colin Pantall’s blog: Random Conversations #6: Photographers are Conservative
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Stephen Shore
The trout streams where I flyfish are cold and clear and rich in the minerals that promote the growth of stream life. As I wade a stream I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water my attention is riveted to it. I’ve found through experience that whenever—or so it seems—my attention wanders or I look away then surely a fish will rise to the fly and I will be too late setting the hook. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes—I strike. Then the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still. Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy.
Stephen Shore, 1982. Explaining his process of photography by way of analogy
“It’s probably true that even the most powerful documentary photographs are more likely to induce gratifying feelings of moral superiority in their beholders than changes in the situations of their subjects. And it’s probably also true that photography has played some role in the more general collapse of politics into ethics. But that’s another way of getting at the fact that photography has more political meaning as art than as documentary, more political significance when it seeks to be beautiful than when it seeks to be relevant.”
—i heart photograph: Interview with Walter Benn Michaels
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“I like the idea of artists sharing a technique that leads to such dangerously similar results, also considering the recurrent thoughts about plagiarism in photography. Should somebody give up because there has been already another one who darkened a room and let the light come in through a tiny hole to project the outside world on the walls inside? Should deadpan portraiture be limited to a small number of photograhers? And what about tall buildings in fast-rising Asian cities?”
—Hippolyte Bayard: Inside a camera
