Since I have been photographing for three decades I have had a lot of time to consider the place of photography and the role of the photographer. From the earliest efforts to control the phenomena of light rays casting an image when refracted to the fixed image on a glass plate and then to a negative that could be endlessly duplicated the strengths and weaknesses of the photographic process have formed and remolded the world. The process that finalizes an image is simple but our reaction to it is varied and complicated. It is not too much to say we are in awe of photography.

When we see a photograph of ourselves it is instantly recognizable as a moment in our lives. Time and its mysterious nature draw us in to the picture. “What was that background image and where did those clothes styles go”? We recognize the element of TIME has written on this thin paper some information to be stored for now and forever or however long the material of the photo will allow.

From the beginning it was humanity’s memory that stored life’s experiences. A sometime inaccurate device, much of history was rendered badly by the subjective mind. When early humans painted on cave walls there is a good chance these were only wishes of success in hunting and a hope for that number of pray. And then, with photography, where did these hopes go? Here was a medium rendering with painful accuracy the details of the world. The subject could not hope for the waist of a teenager since there was proof of middle age spread. Yet, it is the strength of our desire to wish and hope that these elements play a part in making photographs today.

How much wishing is there in our Kodachrome world? To this end, what is the role and responsibility of photography and the photographer? In the modern world photography is bond still by the pictorial standards of painting. Expectations are strong for a beautiful world to be “captured” on film to the extent that photographers find themselves before dawn or near dark exposing film to capture pleasing lighting. Again, a photographer is often called on to “reduce those wrinkles and laugh lines”, basically beautify, a photograph.

It was Van Gogh’s strength of will that his paintings were renderings of a more awe-inspired world, an interior reality that stored bulky bodies and wild, tragic skies. That this gave way to pure abstract painting has as much to do with the separation from photographic accuracy as it does to the tragedy of World War I. It is still valid to ask how photography can unchain itself from the mandate of the beautiful? I contend it should be in the application of the principles of order and symmetry but it could be down another path, as well.

By invading our sense of TIME photography is expected to pay penance. Show us a beautiful world and our ageless selves. Humanity wants to see the TRUTH but not in an unpalatable way. But images of war and the atrocities of those conflicts have brought just that; an unpalatable image. World conflicts have exaggerated the need for beauty and photography is the Pandora’s Box here in the modern world.
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