Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that photography is a means of expressing deeper emotions and ideas rather than merely capturing images.
Sally Mann expresses that her approach to photography has evolved to focus on the underlying concepts and emotions behind her work. Instead of simply documenting appearances, she uses photography as a tool to explore and communicate her feelings about the subject matter, transforming her art into a reflection of her inner thoughts and ideas.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a photography workshop to encourage participants to delve deeper into their motivations.
Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.
It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.
I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.
The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. ...It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
Music has to keep moving. But I was lucky. For me there was always something around the corner.
And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?
Saving Italy is an astonishing account of a little known American effort to save Italy’s vast store of priceless monuments and art during World War II. While American warriors were fighting the length of the country, other Americans were courageously working alongside to preserve the irreplaceable best of Italy’s culture. Read it and be proud of those who were on their own front lines of a cruel war.
I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.
The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
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