the problem
“I am trying to figure out how to teach students that photography is about working out something or working toward something for oneself! How did you learn that John?”
Posted by Shelley Fuller at October 18, 2004 03:48 PM
This was a comment/question that my photo professor in Nebraska had posted in response to this entry.
How? By taking photograqphs. I am interested in the transformation of how the world becomes something entirely new in a photograph. This interest as a feeling, borders on obsession. The only thing to do is to work towards that interest by making pictures. I like to shoot film. I like to be in the darkroom. The “Photographic Experience” is something that becomes harder and harder to separate from what I would consider “my life”. I don’t see any reason for the two to be separate. Photography is intensely personal. I don’t do it for money or for anyone else other than myself. This allows me to focus (a pun!) on what I am interested in.
So I try to let my photographs show me the way that I am headed. Photographically I don’t owe anyone anything. I don’t care about any “Rules”. And I hate when photography is jammed into genres like “Travel”, and “Street”. Simply doing “Street Photography” as a technique becomes trite or dull very quickly. I am not a street photographer. If you have never seen my other webpage, please take a look here to see some (older) examples of my work.
The issue of the conflict/balance between subject matter and the form in the frame is fascinating to me. A lot of people act like the subject of a photograph is something less than what entirely exists within the frame. For photography to become something more than simply “making a photograph”- but at the exact same time being just about “making a photograph” is an issue to deal with for the rest of my life. And this is all just about the formal aspects of it! I am still dealing with what photographs mean and how they work on an emotional level. Not that you can separate the emotion from the form…
There is no end goal other than to continue to live with the process. I need to keep working.
