Photography is about being exquisitely present.
Interpretation
Photography captures the essence of the moment, emphasizing the importance of awareness and presence.
This quote by Joel Meyerowitz suggests that photography is not just about taking pictures; it's about fully engaging with the world around you and being aware of your surroundings. To truly capture a moment, one must be present and mindful, appreciating the beauty and intricacies of life as they unfold. This level of presence enhances creativity and allows for more meaningful expression through the art of photography.
In practice
In a photography workshop, one could use this quote to inspire participants to focus on their surroundings while taking photographs.
They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.
I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.
We think of photography as pictures. And it is. But I think of photography as ideas. And do the pictures sustain your ideas or are they just good pictures? I want to have an experience in the world that is a deepening experience, that makes me feel alive and awake and conscious.
Then I thought, Whoa. If there are no photographs, then there is no history. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to make these pictures. We need a record.
Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.
I like poems that are daggers that sing. I like poems that for all the power of the sentiments expressed, and all the power to upset and offend, are so well made that they’re achieved things. However much they upset you, they also affect you.
Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.
Photographing expresses human desire to preserve passing time. It is like a man struggling with time that elapses, and in general - a desire to preserve oneself.
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, _x000D_ For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. _x000D_ America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, _x000D_ And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford.
Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
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