Do you, as a maker of music or paintings or photography or poetry or ceramics or dance or song or theatre or woolen scarves ever wonder why you do it? Or why you continue to do it in even if you don't make (any) much money at it?
Photographer Garry Winogrand is known to have said, "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed."
Ok, then. Conversation closed.
If I look at it that way, and often I actually do, it may explain why, in the middle of lunch with a couple of friends in a college cafeteria recently, I quickly excused myself to jump up and photograph what I saw over the shoulder of the friend seated across from me. It was a student in a hoodie eating his lunch on the other side of a decorative glass wall.
But I knew it could me so much more.
And it was.
That's why I take pictures. To nudge the ordinary into becoming something extraordinary. To take inventory of the wondrous and magical things that surround me in my daily blah blah blah life. To remind myself that there is beauty all around. To suggest that what is right there in front of me may not be what it actually appears to be. To consider the many possibilities and opportunities that present themselves during the course of even just one day.
How lucky I was that I had my iPhone in my back pocket and that my friends weren't offended when I left the table mid-sentence.
Photographer Garry Winogrand is known to have said, "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed."
Ok, then. Conversation closed.
If I look at it that way, and often I actually do, it may explain why, in the middle of lunch with a couple of friends in a college cafeteria recently, I quickly excused myself to jump up and photograph what I saw over the shoulder of the friend seated across from me. It was a student in a hoodie eating his lunch on the other side of a decorative glass wall.
But I knew it could me so much more.
And it was.
That's why I take pictures. To nudge the ordinary into becoming something extraordinary. To take inventory of the wondrous and magical things that surround me in my daily blah blah blah life. To remind myself that there is beauty all around. To suggest that what is right there in front of me may not be what it actually appears to be. To consider the many possibilities and opportunities that present themselves during the course of even just one day.
How lucky I was that I had my iPhone in my back pocket and that my friends weren't offended when I left the table mid-sentence.
