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.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
The essence of style is how you live your life
Trust me, there's not one night a week I'm not in a theater somewhere. I adore theater, and I go out with friends, so I do have some nights off.
I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.
The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
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