ku # 539 ~ this is my own
Friday, November 28, 2008 at 11:24AM 
Rhythm and rhyme • click to embiggenThere comes a time when you just have to let go of it all and just use the mind-finger:
I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain. - Lee Friedlander
Constructed pictures are fum to make - my decay and disgust and picture window as an example - but I find myself increasingly drawn to those pictures of my own making that were driven in their creation "merely" by an obsession / desire to "see" and observe. Those pictures, while they may seem to reflect no organizational concept, are, in fact, "organized" under the nomenclature, "This is my life. This is what I saw".
And, the more I think about that organizational concept, the more I realize that many, if not most, of the pictures that I like (made by others) can be said to be huddled under that umbrella, whatever their creators stated intent.
I really like to be shown what others see.
Reader Comments (4)
Couldn't you break up "This is my life. This is what I saw." into specific directions?
Instead of just all of what you saw being lumped into a group, why not have a portfolio that shows what you saw when you thought/looked at trees in an urban environment or what you saw when you thought/looked at how man interacts with nature in a specific region of the world.
The pictures do not have to have some organizing concept, they are just a reflection of what you saw while investigating something in our world.
Yes Mark, what your say really strikes a chord. I think that is at the very core of my interest in photography.
Almost everything else seem to be an addition to this for me.
That was an excellent quotation, and the thinking around it was quite inspiring.
I have recently tried to understand my photography obsession, and one of the possible reasons is that a moment of a life captured in a photo allows the later study of a hidden thing. These photos are missives from former selves, and allow a kind of connection between a self that existed previously with the self you have now become.
Many of our friends, and some family, ask my wife and I, "Why did you take a picture of that?", we answer, "Because it is what I saw." It is real, it is life.
Think of it this way. You drive around your neighborhood everyday same old, same old. Then one day you are a passenger and you start to see things you never noticed before because you were driving and looking straight ahead, when you are the passenger you notice more around you. It is the same with photography, look around, see the real life.