2010-11-16

the two eyed truth




Every day, I try to reconsider why I take photographs, which one are worth showing, which are best kept hidden for the time being and how much I care or not about the photographs belonging to a certain category or school or what degree of ripping off other people's work, inspiration, of being under the influence have possessed me while pressing the shutter ( thank god, so far cameras still have a shutter release even if THEY are trying to convince us that HD video  is the new photography... leave the shutter open for 5 hours you might get a good image out of it). I know, it is time consuming. It leave me no time to do something else. Sometimes, it leaves me no time to go out and take photographs. But I enjoy very much doing all this  r e c o n s i d e r a t i o n. I take it very seriously. It means, I have a tremendous knowledge of the history of photography and I have to be up to scratch with art history as well and sociology is important, so is general history and a certain amount of understanding of technology, optics and chemistry becoming things of the past but you never really forget what you learned at school. In order to reconsider, to consider objectively what I am recording, I have learned that the most important things are honesty and modesty and those two traits belongs to philosophy because they are entirely subjective. I genuinely enjoyed reading Roland Barthes and Regis Durand when I was young, it spoke to me even more so than Jack Kerouac,  Celine and Henri Miller all together; to this day, my bible is The New History of Photography by Michel Frizot. I am a photography swot; but when I shoot, I'm high on adrenaline and my entire body contract in the single effort of catching a fickle vision, my brain stop functioning under the pressure. I'm close to death. It will take my senses from an hour to many years to retrace the event. I was going to start talking about photography as a mean to step out from a situation, as in Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and probably William Eggleston and probably Juergen Teller and probably countless others including myself have saved their life by holding a camera in front of them but I do not like to brag about people I have never even met, so I'll go and make a cup of tea and start considering those shots of an 18 year old model I took on saturday.

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