Two Statements about Photography and Two Quotations

Photography is a curious medium.  It has an illusory relationship with truth and a peculiar relationship with time. It has a contingent relationship with facts, a singular relationship with things, and an essential, elemental relationship with light.  There is in photographs an odd conflation of intimacy and distance, the real and the surreal, and of revelation and deception.  I am drawn to each of these elements as well as to their contradictions, and to the impossibility of reconciling them completely.

I became a photographer because I have always been interested in things and pictures, and in pictures as things, and in things as pictured.  I believe that the stuff of the world and visual images can be compelling, evocative, and powerful, if we are able to see them well.  And they require such seeing, since they have no capacity, as language does, to tell us how to see.  Whether I have an intellectual understanding of things and pictures is of less concern to me than that I find them rich in suggestion, possibility, and mystery.

 

“The more avidly you want an explanation of the meaning behind a powerful and cryptic work of art—from David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis—the less satisfying and comprehensive the answer can ever be. Sometimes how a book or a film puzzles you—how it may mystify even its own creator—is the main point.  The way it keeps slithering out of your grasp.  The way it chats with you in the parlor even as it drags something nameless and heavy through the woods out back.  The person who made it went off into the dark somewhere and came back holding this beautiful thing, a genuine souvenir.  But can even she understand exactly what it is or what it’s for?  Relax: You’ll never know. You can never know.”

– Laura Miller, from her Slate Book Review of The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

“…our perceptions of the world will ultimately tell us more about our perception than they will tell us of the world.  Likewise, any photograph tells us more of photography than the subject represented, and a body of work by an individual will inform us more of the photographer per se than of photography.”

– Gary Metz