Q: What relation do you find between photography and reality?
A: It's always less and less. I grew up with the paradigm that photography was reality. But very quickly I realized that they're very different things, although photography, because of its nature, has the possibility of capturing a certain substratum of reality [...] Nowadays it's possible to develop other possibilities of photography, but always, as much as they might try to deny it, that substratum of reality will always be there, it's the ore of photography, it's one of its most attractive characteristics and I believe that the success of this non-representational photography of recent years wouldn't have been the same without this touch [gota] of the preexisting.
Armando Cristeto in Conversaciones con fotógrafos mexicanos (Conversations With Mexican Photographers), pub. Gustavo Gili 2007.
1 comment:
Holy crap! I cannot tell you how much I think about this! Every day, when riding the bus, sitting in the office, playing with my cat, I stop and think "how would I capture this with a camera, with a single photograph?" Photographs are used to create memories and seem somewhat "real" when they evoke memories of certain trips or situations or ideas, but only for the photographer. When someone looks at an image for the first time, they are ignorant of the possible memories the image evokes for the photographer. It is hard sometimes as a photographer to separate oneself from that nostalgia. It is important to forget for a moment that you have ever held a camera, and to look at a picture for what it basically is - an aesthetic image, a combination of shapes and lines or tones in stark contrast that are pleasing to the eye. Right on Cristeto!
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