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.
The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.
I think that the point of being an architect is to help raise the experience of everyday living, even a little. Putting a window where people would really like one. Making sure a shaving mirror in a hotel bathroom is at the right angle. Making bureaucratic buildings that are somehow cheerful.
I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.
The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.
I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.
Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.
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