Cartago Valle del Cauca Colombia 1988 (1988) Fotografia da Stuart Haden

I am searching for new subjects and innovative ways of expressing them. How the subjects look within the frame interests me. I want to make beautiful photographs which are balanced, simple, surprising and more meaningful than the collection of facts the camera describes.

There are two main types of photography that exist. John Szarkowski, the past Curator of the Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection divided photography into Mirrors and Windows and wrote a book about it. Self expression exemplified by Mirrors and exploration exemplified by Windows are broadly how Szarkowski divides the practice of photograhy. I prefer the Window type of photography. This is the photography practiced by Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Cartier- Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Sebastiao Salgado, William Eggleston, Robert Adams, Jan Groover, Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore. I am a Window or realist type photographer and I study these master photographers.

The seven characteristics of my kind of photography are:
1. It deals with the real world. David Bailey said: “It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.” Garry Winogrand, my teacher and mentor, said: “Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.I photograph to see what things look like photographed.” So a photograph of a person is not about that person. It is a photograph of how that person looks photographed. It is an illusion. A photograph is always a lie. There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. A photograph has form and content. That form and content are related to the machine, the tools and materials which have made it. In my case it is the film, the camera, the developer, the enlarger and the printing paper. In other words it is true to the medium of photography. Of course the technology is always changing. Now you can make 3D photographs, digital photographs and colour photographs. It is not painting or drawing. Still photography is a mechanical and chemical process. The illusion of literal description is what the tools and materials of photography do better than any other graphic medium. Again Winogrand said: “A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera saw a piece of time and space. Anything is photographable. There is no particular way a photograph should look.” I like to see photographs as photographs not as drawings or paintings. Unfortunately “people believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art”, quoted Mason Cooley. And again “The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn’t what you saw at the time. The real skill of the photographer is organised visual lying”, said Terence Donovan. And lastly the gr...

• Nazionalità: REGNO UNITO
• Data di nascita : 1942
• Domini artistici:
• Gruppi: Artisti Britannici Contemporanei