Photography is an art form like no other. It allows your to instantaneously capture time, and at the same moment, fade the colors of day into night so that you can print them out again and give them to the world, in the purity of black and white.
Images at their passionate and truthful best are as powerful as words can ever be. If they alone cannot bring change, they can at least provide and understanding mirror of man’s actions, thereby sharpening human awareness and awakening conscience.
Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer’s responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it. To put it another way, the statement the image makes – not just what it show you, but the mood, moral evaluation and casual connections it suggest – is built up from those details. A proper “reading” of a photograph sees and responds to them consciously.
Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.
Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.
Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of the human spirit.
Sympathetic interpretation seldom evolves from a predatory attitude: the common term “taking a picture” is more than just an idiom: it is a symbol of exploitation. “Making a picture” implies a creative resonance which is essential to profound expression.
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.
Photography is the ideal medium in which to challenge assumptions, because of all art forms, it is one people most expect to represent reality…The creative photographer grapples with these expectations, shaping or altering reality by the way he or she approaches a subject.
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them…a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create – so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.
When we are angry or depressed in our creativity, we have misplaced our power. We have allowed someone else to determine our worth, and then we are angry at being undervalued.
There is nothing mysterious about space-time. Every speck of matter, every idea, is a space-time event. We cannot experience anything or conceive of anything that exists outside of space-time. Just as experience precedes all awareness and creative expression, the visual language of our photographs should ever more strongly express the fourth dimensional structure of the real world.
Only a fraction of the camera’s possibilities interests me — the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.
Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.
Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one’s general culture, one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind, one’s vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.
A collection of photographs I've made as I explore the interplay of light in the world around me. Photography is not about the search for perfection, but rather the exploration of one's vision.
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Film Photography Submission By: Long Cao
Camera: Canon AE-1, Portra 400
Subway platform at 190 St, Washington Heights, New York City.
AQUA by The New No. 2
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