Almost Seeing
(excerpt)
Notes to myself -
Recognizing the prosaic in photographs and aiming for something else, a kind of visual poetry - overall visual music. My friend Israel Hershberg told me to never apologize for beauty. Going out into the world and getting oneself into a pictorially receptive state of mind.
As Gary Winogrand urged simply, “Look at what is happening in the picture. What is happening? What kind or relationships do you see?” I ask myself: Are things visually interesting? Are there hierarchical levels to the image? A direction? Maybe a climax to the picture? Or a similar all-over effect? See relationships, not just “things”! Looking for pictorial solutions that call attention to the surface, stopping the eye at the picture plane, blocking or complicating the all-too easy perspective arrived at through the lens. For me, the photographic image is not only a window through which to see the visible world, but also a maker of flat surfaces, interrupting or stunting logical perspectival space.
“Picturing reality”. There is a reality that we all see around us, that we navigate through daily and then there is the reality that we “picture”, that we find, we “frame”, we push for in the viewfinder. The picture in the viewfinder is all that matters. Add to this the “campaign” we embellish photographs with through selective tonal emphasis/de-emphasis.
J. P., 2016