ALL TOGETHER NOW

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IT STARTED OUT WITH MY LIFELONG REGRET at not being able to interview the world’d greatest photographers. Beyond the fact that too few opportunities for actually meeting the greats would ever present themselves in a dozen lifetimes, there was the problem of what, in the name of all that’s holy, I would even ask. Which of them could define, for all the others, what constituted a good picture? Which single person’s work could speak to the full possibilities of the medium? I learned to be content with studying the piecemeal remarks some of them had made, words that often were as evanescent or mysterious as their visual work. And then I realized that they were all, equally, correct.

More precisely, they were all, in an infinite variety of viewpoints, all articulating the same quest, the same terms for their work. Technical mastery, yes, but also personal discovery, a constant struggle to better know one’s self, to hone one’s eye, to synch it with the soul more effectively. I decided to try to show how common this struggle was, across the words of so many shooters, by concocting a kind of “superquote”, a coherent general statement about photography that was actually a composite of the thoughts of many. I served one up in these pages about a year ago, and it was such fun that I offer what follows here as the sequel. As before, different sentences or thoughts originated with different photographers, the identities of which are given, in order of their appearance, in the key below. We are all different, and we are all the same.

Q: How would you (all of you) characterize your personal view of your work?

A: Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work. It’s not enough to just own a camera. Everyone owns a camera. To be a photographer, you must understand, appreciate, and harness the power you hold. Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them with the value of a complete existence. In photography, there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality. It’s about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts. To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. The eye should learn to listen before it looks. Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification. But no matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture. The two most engaging powers of a photograph are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
So stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

(1.Martin Parr 2. Mark Denman 3. Edward Muybridge 4. Alfred Stieglitz 5. Garry Winogrand  6. Henri Cartier-Bresson 7. Robert Frank 8. Dorothea Lange 9.Joe McNally 10. Doug Bartlow 11. William Thackeray 12. Man Ray 13. Walker Evans)