Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.
David Bowie
“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
– Leonard Bernstein
AR: Some of the models you photograph, like those based on a Kuen surface, start off as computer renderings that can only be created as an object by a five-armed robotic machine. How do you feel about generative art, machine learning and AI?
HS: I’m kind of scared of it. Once it can do a job better than a human, what can a human do? Particularly in terms of the skills involved in thinking and imagination. If a human can’t do as good of a job as the machine, then what is the point of a human? The brain has to be trained to keep thinking. If you don’t have to think deeply – if you let the computer think for you – then the human brain will have to become something else.
AR: That’s transhumanism, isn’t it? Where humans interface fully with technology. Do you think that’s inevitable?
HS: I’m just glad I’m not going to be living in that future. But the world will end very soon in my estimation. For example, if you compare last year’s global temperature with this year, it’s one or two degrees hotter now – global warming is now global boiling. I think the end is coming pretty soon.
From ArtReview Oct 2023
To penetrate and record, even if only reflectively through an idea-image, that which takes place in, over, under, around, and through mature, is to feel the intangible, the somewhere in-between, the what is and the what I am, the interaction between visible and invisible. This is what I look for – what I am interested in. I am concerned with what grows out of interaction.
…
Photography’s potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.
…
Who has the time today, really the time, to grow, to unfold, and develop in an activity or even to contemplate properly what others are doing? Life ought to be lived more like harmonious music. The pressure of hastening things, of skimming superficially, only destroys that sense of music in life.
Paul Caponigro, Aperture magazine, spring 1967
The Forest
Maria Polydouri
look, all around you
the embrace of the Night.
Redolent of intoxicating scents,
it sighs from the nightingale.
The moon above it
is strangely emerging
and in the mirror of the river
lays down her magic.
“They have a spectral quality that acknowledges photography’s inherent relationship to mortality – in isolating a moment from the larger flow, it memorialises an instant from which time moves relentlessly forward.”
John B. Ravenal, Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit, writing on What Remains.
“This rationale or working method for the miniature camera is one of discovery. One of using the accidental intelligently; one of treating the camera as an investigating tool to uncover the emotional blind spots of the prejudiced human eye.”
Minor White, Aperture No. 1, 1952
“Being part of the landscape is the mystery, the richness of its paradox. The landscape is in me and I am in the landscape.”
John Olson
“Is there any reason why Tasmania should not be more beautiful on the day we leave it, than on the day we came?… If we can revise our attitudes towards the land under our feet; if we can accept a role of steward and depart from the role of the conqueror, if we can accept that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole, then Tasmania can be a shining beacon in a dull, uniform and largely artificial world.”
Olegas Truchanas
“A SEQUENCE of photographs is like a cinema of stills. A cinema arrested at the high points and which lock the story to the memory. Each image is economical because of what has led to it and what it leads into. Each contains the thrust of forward movement as well as the foundation of what has happened. The gaps between pictures are as important as the images, tho they have to be filled by the reader from what he can grasp of the intentions of the artist, the implications of the subject, the implications of the treatment.”
“ABSTRACTION in photography is to reach towards the non-objective without ever breaking camera’s strongest point—the magic of its tether to visual reality.”
– Minor White, Material proposed for the foreword of the Fourth Sequence, 1950
“From time to time various images in front of my eyes lift themselves
– Minor White, Letter to Helmut Gernsheim, 1953
up and beckon to me— I approach at their command— and make the exposure, sometimes reluctandy, but always with such a complete projection of my mental state onto the object that it seems as if the object commanded and not myself. At this intensity I photograph. The result is a record of an experience between myself and the object. The object may be a cloud, a door, a rock, a person, a situation.
If the result happens to look like contemporary “abstract” painting, or happens to look like Leonardo, or Hoffer [sic], or a painter yet to be born, or like nothing on earth, I do not care (As one of my friends said when looking at some recent negative prints, ‘They make you remember things that you have not known yet”).
People often get tangled in the categories, whether the photo looks like abstractions, Picasso, Rubens, documentary, etc. This is hardly surprising, I have done it a million times. But as a photographer I pass up no image because it happens to resemble another man’s work. I am slowly learning to recognize those images that are in the thin red line of uniqueness to the man.”
“Art is an attempt to connect the sacred and the profane, dark and light, life and death”
Ran Ortner via Roger Imms
“That part of the South is a kind of netherworld. I was asking the land to give up its ghosts. Collodion is the ideal medium for such landscapes. It is contemplative, memorial… In the face of some extraordinary sight or place you do not just take a picture. It is ceremonial. I am not a religious person, but there is an experience of communion in wet-plate photography. It is not a drive-by shooting.”
– Sally Mann
Interview with Sally Mann. See Lyle Rexer, from Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 80-81.
Profligate physical beauty is easy to find in the South, but what gins up the ecstasy is the right light, the resonant, beating heart of that light, unique to the south. The landscape appears to soften before your eyes and becomes seductively vague, as if inadequately summoned up by some shiftless creator casually neglectful of the details.
Sally Mann, Hold Still (213)