I am a camera...

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in her kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

-Christopher Isherwood (Goodbye to Berlin)



In his introduction to the catalog of the exhibition, The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski talks about the history of photography, and photography in the present day. Szarkowski says that “ The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process --a process based not on synthesis but on selection” he says that “paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken.” When photography first came about, it radically changed the art world. A creative issue of a new order was raised; “how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms – pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view?” How could photography be art? As photography grew and technology advanced, this question became even more important. With the creation of dry plate photography, snapshot photography, and much later the digital camera, photography became available to everyone, artist or not.

Everyone takes photographs (most people have a digital camera on their phone), so what makes a photograph art? Is a photograph art? I do believe that photography can be a fine art. Anyone can take a picture, but not everyone can take a good picture. Not everyone can create art with a camera. It is the photographers that pay attention to the thing they are photographing, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point, that make art. It is the photographers who do not merely document the physical, but also the emotional and metaphysical, that create not just photographs, but art. Anyone can take a picture by pressing a button, but not everyone can be Richard Avedon, Annie Leibowitz, Christopher Makos, or Terry Richardson.

My goal in this class is to not simply just observe the physical and capture it with my camera. My goal is to be the camera, to be constantly observing, tuning into not just the physical presence of the subject of my photograph, but also into the very essence of the subject. I want to capture not only the outer beauty of my subject, but also the inner. I do not want to just point and click.