Opinionated Artists

A friend of mine once gave me a little book full of quotes and sayings by some of the wisest and most intuitive men and women to ever walk the planet. Her explanation for the gift was this: "Many have said what needs to be said much more gracefully and memorably than I could ever hope to be. Here are my thoughts through the mouths of others." I have kept that little quote book going and very much enjoy adding the profound to its pages. It is an extremely heavy little book. The above picture needs to be explained to you, but I have found that others have already said what I want to say much better than I could ever hope to put. I am far from the best photographer and even farther from being the most profound. I stand meekly in great shadows. However, with the help of the casters of these great shadows, I hope to explain to you the photograph.

Ansel Adams is one of the greatest names in photography and, in my mind, is one of the wisest in the medium. Photography is not merely the pressing of a button. Photography extends far past the camera into the mind of the photographer. Adams puts it best, "When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without." A photograph is much more than the gathering of light in the fibers of a paper or the printing of pixels on a piece; a photograph is the capture of an idea, a passion, an emotion, or a theme. This, combined with the assumed objectivity of a photograph leads Adams to his next point, "Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs." A work of art can be twisted, warped, created, and pressured to be something outside of reality much easier than a photograph could ever be. Photography is art, but it is also a window to reality that people allow themselves the capacity to believe. Ferdinando Scianno said "A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world." A photograph has the ability to capture all that it sees. Adams says "We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium."

Possibly my favorite quote in regard to photography is from Francis Bacon, "Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people's souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people's life by looking at their souls and exposing them to His light."

In this madness and flurry of opinion, I've extracted nothing but contradictory opinions from different photographers and their personal feelings on the photograph. What is a photograph? Is it what the photographer intends it to be or what the viewer makes of it? Could it be both?

To be honest, as I sat in my backyard looking at a small, rusted birdbath, not many thoughts crossed my mind. To be as accurate as possible, what crossed my mind was most probably exactly this, "Well, that's pretty." And, drawn by beauty and nothing more, I lifted my old Nikon FA to my eye, set the exposure, and, when I pressed that little silver button, let the world write itself onto my film.

"A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words." -Ansel Adams