Shudder4/9/2019 I think one of my students is onto something when he refers to the `shudder button’ of a camera. Perhaps one should never press it unless one feels a shudder.
Preconceptions4/7/2019 The difficulty lies in letting go of our preconceptions and letting our eyes and ears guide us.
Eyes4/6/2019 A good photograph is not an object or an artwork. It is the eye of the photographer looking into the eye of the viewer.
Smallness4/4/2019 Each haiku and each photograph is a distilled droplet that refracts the world.
Misquoting Edwin T. Morris’s book on Chinese gardens, I would say that a great emotional charge can be wrung from a small photographic print which is only a few inches in size but which is expansive in poetical space. Smallness invites expansion. Expansion4/3/2019 By a process of expansion photographs can spill beyond their visible frame to be encompassed by the broadened mental space of the viewer’s imagination. The smaller the photograph, the greater its potential for expansion.
Resuscitation4/2/2019 The photographer’s job is to produce frames for the viewer’s imagination.
Framing isolates what is photographed so that we can see better and also isolates the viewer so that they can dream better. Tarkovsky’s Zone is another frame where exterior and interior spaces conjoin, interpenetrated by the very material of time itself, made dense by our experience of it, congealing before our very eyes. In photography, the point of departure is a frame of dead time, resuscitated by the viewer’s breath as they move in close, drawn by its stillness. Such intimacy is only possible with icons and photographs small enough, close enough, to kiss, prints on the same human scale as our journeys. Now-Time4/1/2019 Images emerge in the now-time of walking, halting us. Meaning emerges in the now-time of reading, halting us.
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