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.
Interpretation
Photography captures fleeting moments, emphasizing the transient nature of life.
In this quote, Joel Meyerowitz reflects on the essence of photography as an art form that encapsulates the fleeting nature of moments. He suggests that through the lens of a camera, one can recognize the beauty and significance of a scene that is often only present for the briefest instant. This philosophical insight highlights the importance of being present and aware, as life’s moments can vanish as quickly as they appear.
In practice
This quote could inspire a speech at a photography workshop.
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 about being exquisitely present.
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 hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
When everything goes right a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise!
As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
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