"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

 -Diane Arbus  1970

 

“Vantage point, frame, focus, and time are a photographer’s basic formal tools for defining the content and organisation of a picture. What a photographer pays attention to governs these decisions (be they conscious, intuitive, or automatic). These decisions resonate with the clarity of the photographer’s attention.
They conform to the photographer’s mental organisation - 
the visual gestalt of the picture.”

- Stephen Shore   2007

 

At first reading, these quotes might seem to represent two very different ways of thinking about photography. I think they are both true and both very helpful to anyone looking at photographs. Arbus speaks of that quality of “impenetrability” that makes Roland Barthes ache as he studies pictures of his mother after her death, hoping to get “closer’ to her… Shore addresses the specifics of formal “photographic seeing”.  Taken together, we have here the qualities “punctum” and “studium” which Barthes uses to judge the inherent power of a photograph. What should not be doubted is that photographs can be extraordinarily powerful. and can affect us deeply on all sorts of levels. Though I love taking/making photographs (I taught black & white analog photography for over thirty years and feel very much at home in the darkroom), what I really love doing is looking at photographs, collecting  photographs, and thinking about photographs… and don’t get me started, I really love talking about photography… 

 

The works presented here, I consider studies.  The Cloud Studies have a close kinship with Alfred Steiglitz’s Equivalents series from the 1920s and 30s. Often, like Gary Winogrand,  “I take photographs, to see what things look like photographed”.  I also, like most people, take photographs because I see something amazing in front of me,  however subtle or dazzling it might be… and feel the need to share it with others. Many of these images were taken in France and speak intimately of the landscape and vernacular culture of the Ardèche region where I have spent a lot of time over the past fifteen years. A number of them have perhaps an emblematic quality which I think most landscape photographers seek as they create their images. 

 

And once again… from the seen, we moved toward the signified.