urban ku # 116 - it's a national holiday

Rain in the gloaming with street light • click to embiggenIt has been said that Henri Cartier-Bresson said that it doesn't matter if something was in focus ... as long you got the image - something with which I agree for the most part.

This notion about 'focus' is the reason why pictures made with Holgas, fixed-focus Polaroids, Kodak Instamatics, lores digitals, and other so-called 'krappy kameras' tend to work for me. The thing that I like is that the pictures made with these cameras, because of their lack of detail and specificity, become very fertile grounds for rumination and the imagination. 'Meaning' for the observer can be even more personal than it is with straight pictures.

All of which was summed up neatly by a quote from Oliver Culmann of the French photographer's collective Tendance Floue; "The image has a life of its own. Just because you take the image, it doesn't mean it belongs to you. How it is received, how it is distributed - all that stuff - means the image is an object that develops a life apart from you."

... which, IMO, does not in any way negate the notion that a photographer can make pictures with a 'suggested - inferred - implied' meaning or meanings that many observers will 'get' and, for the 'thinking types' amongst them, expand upon.