Admiration | Wonder – Photography

When I started taking photographs seriously over 50 years ago, producing my first images for a fee, I thought the year 2000 would never arrive. Now we’re well into the 21st century, my earliest photos are rotting away in some newspaper archive, and I remain curious about the images that keep coming my way. I still haven’t had my fill of everything around me. And it’s not that I find the images, but rather that the images come to me. The thing is, a serious illness has practically cut me off from the outside world; even the garden has become a foreign concept. Nature seems to have understood my situation and delivers the most amazing spectacles right to my doorstep. And that’s what I press the shutter.

… But then, as now, black and white photography was considered the ultimate. Lacking the knowledge, resources, and time, I myself long resisted color photography, convinced that graphic, black and white images offered stronger expressive possibilities. The pursuit of sharpness in resolution and depth, as seen, for example, in the work of the f/64 group I admire, or in purely graphic compositions, or in this perpetual classification of “photography as a representation of reality,” occupied me for a time as well. Especially this disparaging thesis with its countless supporting documents, this unspeakable notion of “photography as art.” Today I know—it’s all untrue! Photography is art, or at least one of its countless forms. Even the highly valued technical skills and the frowned-upon artifacts are, together, stylistic devices used to convey meaning, at least for me.