Category: quotes

words from Mary Ellen Mark

~ pj ~ 6 Comments

I’m trying to please myself; certainly that’s a big criterion… though in a sense, I don’t take images just for myself. I take images that I think other people will want to see. I don’t take pictures to put in a box and hide them. I want as many people to see them as possible.

Mary Ellen Mark

I came across this quote by Mary Ellen Mark, and it makes a point I’ve been wrestling with lately. I want as many people as possible to see what I do. Whether anybody likes what I do or not isn’t the point. Some will, some won’t, most won’t really care one way or the other. To me an important part of taking pictures is simply showing them and letting whoever stumbles on to them decide for themselves if it’s worth spending their time with them. I think I’ll start showing more again.

I’ve been posting a few snapshots here on and off, but I haven’t been on Twitter for a few months now, and I haven’t done Instagram in a couple of years. One of these days I’ll probably start doing both again for a simple reason — I take a lot of snapshots, I do it for the fun and pleasure of doing it, I like to experiment and play with different approaches, and I like to show what I do. When I first started in photography it was much more difficult to show your work. There were limited opportunities and there were gatekeepers to get through at all of them. Not so now, and I want to take advantage of that.

I can start up Instagram any time I want to, but I’ll wait on Twitter until most of the gas concerning the upcoming election has been passed and a decision has been made. When that might be still seems to be a bit of a moving target. I’ll be posting here now and then too. Maybe I’ll see you around…

and more from Mark Klett

~ pj ~ Leave a comment

So much of what we know, and what we think we know, about the land has first passed through someone’s lens. The interesting thing is to make use of this history, not merely to be absorbed into it. For me, landscape photographs begin as the artifacts of personal moments. They get interesting when they become cultural commentary.

Mark Klett

more from Shore

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To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility – that is what I am interested in.
Stephen Shore

words from Emmet Gowin

~ pj ~ 2 Comments

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we’re quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that’s useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can’t know exactly what it is we are doing.

Emmet Gowin

words from Mark Klett

~ pj ~ 2 Comments

I am not much interested in discovering new territories to photograph. Instead, what I wish my pictures could do is lessen the distance one often feels when looking at landscape photographs… The longer I work, the more important it is to me to make photographs that tell my story as a participant, and not just an observer of the land.

Mark Klett

words from Stephen Shore

~ pj ~ 2 Comments

See, if you only take pictures that you know are going to be good, then you’re not going to take any risks, and you’re not going to take any pictures that are in fact going to be any good. So you have to have the freedom to fall on your face and make mistakes.

Stephen Shore

words from Robert Adams

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Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.

Robert Adams