I'm nobody! Who are you?Seen in Eye to Eye: Photographs by Vivian Maier (*)
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
The reason his photographs often feel numbly impersonal now is not just that they are familiar. It’s that they’re so coolly composed, so infernally correct that there’s nothing raw about them, and you find yourself thinking: would it not be more interesting if his moments were a little less decisive?via Cartier-Bresson's classic is back – but his Decisive Moment has passed (*) by Sean O'Hagan (*).
there are only four ways to function as a photographer. Either you are independently wealthy; or you get paid to take pictures (a commercial photographer, with whatever independence of mind you can retain); or you get paid for photographs (i.e. as an artist [..]); or your photography is a hobby, a pastime, and you earn your living elsewhere.via Walker Evans: the magazine work STEIDL, 2014 (*) by David Campany (*).
I write a lot about photobooks on this blog. The photobook world is small, a few thousand people, but it is dynamic. Sometimes it's too small and it gets too self-congratulatory. When it becomes most interesting is when it looks out of itself, That's when you get great photobooks that are great books - that touch on the world at large, that tie in with a bigger picture, and touch hearts and souls beyond those of the 10,000 people in the world who regularly buy photobooks.via Luton Airport, x-rays and Blue Peter (*) by Colin Pantall (*).
Any photograph is both more or less a record of what has happened, and more or less an artistically enhanced experience, both more or less empirical, and more or less interpretive, both more or less accurate, and more or less suggestive. The point here is that photographs –whether analogue or digital—operate in the interspace between reality and imagination. The camera records the surface of the world like no other instrument, but the truth of what is shown can be realized only through an act of imagination. Stated otherwise, the photograph is inherently not reducible to a simplistic realism, but is instead a heterogeneous object where different sources of meaning intersect, and the intersections are lodged in the formal design and explored through interpretation.via A Realist Imagination (or is it An Imaginary Realism?) (*) by No Caption Needed (*).
