Photographs on the Brain #49

Written on December 5, 2012 by Bryan Formhals in Photographs on the Brain

I’m just interested in good photographs. I’m not a documentarist. I’m not trying to document anything. It’s more about deciphering and transforming. I make what you might call real-life photographs. - Tom Wood

Left: ©Csilla Klenyanszki;Right: ©Bruno Barbey

©Peter van Agtmael

You have no duty to the facts. Your loyalty is to the honesty of your ideas, emotions, dreams, desires and needs; what Werner Herzog calls the ecstatic truth. That is your goal. Nobody cares about the minutiae and what you want is to make people care. Tell them a good story. – James Luckett

Left: ©Eirik Johnson; Right: ©Henry Horenstein

Photography derives its power not from what it shows, but from what we think it says. Seemingly very specific, photographs are anything but – which means that at least in photography, the idea of the death of the author is flawed: There never was an author in the first place. Instead, the photographer always is just the instigator, the person standing next to you who’ll whisper secrets into your ear to make you believe in certain things. - Joerg Colberg

Left: ©Camille Vivier; Right: ©Alec Soth

You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. - Joel Sternfeld

Left: ©Esther Kroon; Right: ©Jody Rogac

You really can’t teach photography, and what you really can’t teach that photographers need, is curiosity. You cannot teach curiosity. If you’re not curious about life then you’re just spinning your wheels. - Dennis Darling