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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of photography in preserving history and memories.
In this quote, Joel Meyerowitz expresses the critical role that photographs play in documenting experiences and events, suggesting that without them, our history remains incomplete. It reflects the idea that capturing moments through photography is essential for creating a visual record that informs future generations about the past.
In practice
During a photography exhibition, one might say this quote to highlight the significance of the displayed images.
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.
Photography is about being exquisitely present.
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.
When I first started out in this music industry, I was most concerned with freedom. Freedom to produce, freedom to play all the instruments on my records, freedom to say anything I wanted to.
Writing fueled me, and my task was to make it fit into my life. I practiced my trade as an attorney, and on weekends and holidays, I typed away. I assumed a nom de plume, Selena Montgomery, to separate my fiction from more academic publications.
I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.
If you don't know what to play, play nothing.
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