Crawley
Camera Club Phrase of the Month Archival Page
December 2011 "A photograph gives us the naked truth which must be clothed by the imagination."
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe
November 2011 "One of the pictorial devices used in tableau photography to engender anxiety or uncertainty about the meaning of an image is to depict figures with their faces turned away from us, leaving their character unexplained."
Charlotte Cotton The Photograph as Contemporary Art Thames & Hudson 2004 (rev ed 2009)
September 2011
Although at times Ray Moore photographed areas of outstanding natural beauty, he preferred subjects "on the edge of civilisation" where there were traces of human existence. He described his main subject as the, "no man's land between the real and the fantasy - the mystery in the commonplace - the uncommonness of the commonplace."
Mark Haworth-Booth "British Contemporaries" in "The Art of Photography 1839-1989" Royal Academy of Arts London
August 2011
"You photograph something for its own qualities but in photographing it there's something in that thing that evokes a stream of consciousness about something that is not directly related to that thing … the forms become equivalent to memories, to something subconsciously felt."
Beaumont Newhall defining the "Equivalent" quoted by Wynn Bullock in "Dialogue with Photography" Eds. Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper 1979
April 2011
"The
casual snapshot aesthetic was associated with the Beat generation of
the 1950s, whose members made a virtue of imperfection ... Snapshots
also lend themselves to diaristic and confessional modes of photography."
Photospeak Gilles Mora Abbeville Press, New York
1998
March 2011
"The
caption can be seen as an anchor to the meaning of a photograph. The
political importance of their use is in opposing the concealed
determinates of the free reading of an image by the provision of a
specific social meaning which can resist the distortions of
contextualisation. The caption, actual or implied, is often the entry
into the picture."
John Stezaker, Fragments Photographers' Gallery London 1978
January 2011
The 'decisive moment' theory has been
criticised for holding photography in thrall to a formal academicism
that is inevitably incompatible with documentary objectivity. Robert
Frank broke with this elegant aesthetic of selective distanced
reportage in his book "The Americans". In Frank's view, "Every moment
is valuable".
Gilles Mora "Photospeak" Abbeville
Press 1998
October
2010
I came, I saw, I photographed.
Photography allows the individual to pay homage to beauty and
achievement as if in some religious ritual.
Mark Galer "Photography:
Foundations for Art & Design" 4th ed 2007
September 2010
The nature
of
photography is that, as you work, you
continually record a world that has gone for ever; yet you continuously
see the new world unfold in front of you. The old and the
new are
in uninterrupted contrast.
David Hurn
Wales, Land
of my Father Thames & Hudson 2000 page12
August 2010
I
subscribe to that school of thought which says that you should
look at your mistakes and accidents as your subconscious strategies ...
as your perspective changes, what was opaque at the time becomes
clearer. The medium has this amazing consultability that extends far
beyond the surface of the image. Paul Graham
July 2010 A photograph is not just an
image but an "image act", encompassing not only its production but also
its reception and contemplation ... This concept encouraged many French
photographers to practice "photobiography".
Gilles Mora, "Photospeak" Abbeville Press 1998, page 145
June 2010 "Philip Stokes said of
the
experience of looking at other people's
family albums, "In every dreary litany there is an instant when a
window opens onto a scene of fascination that stops the eye and seizes
the mind, filling it with questions or simply joy." Quoted
by Liz Wells in,
"Photography - A Critical Introduction"
Routledge 1997 page 44
Feb 2010 "It could be argued that photography has the function of helping
one to overcome the sorrow of the passing of time, either by providing
a magical substitute for what time has destroyed, or by making up for
the failure of memory, acting as a mooring for the evocation of
associated memories, in short by providing a sense of conquest of time
as a destructive power."
Pierre Bourdieu "Photography, a middle-brow art" 1965 (English
translation Polity Press 1990)
November 2009 "For Henri Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment was not when he
pressed
the shutter button but when he viewed the contact sheets."
Prof. Paul Hill De Montfort University Leicester . (Talk October 2009)
October 2009:
Photography with its
stress on visible
phenomena, and their peculiar recognisability, places a prominent
question mark against the validity of abstractionism in art; which
occasionally succumbs to convention and dogma and has exhausted the
possibilities of self-referential variation on formal models.
"How You Look At It"
by Heinz
Liesbrock pub Thames & Hudson 2000
September 2009:
"The
knowing portraitee adopts a pose which anticipates the representational
image and takes account of the fact that this piece of paper will
outlast the actual person who is the subject of the portrait, becoming
the "flat death" which both exposes that which has been and precedes
actual death."
Roland Barthes "Camera Lucida" (English edition 1981)
May 2009:
"Since indexical relationships to
the world are being created en masse by snap-shotters, any photography
with artistic aspirations must be on the look-out for ways of
differentiating itself, and these are to be found in the realms of the
iconic and the symbolic."
Thomas Wagner, "how you look at
it" Thames & Hudson 2000 page 93
February
2009: "Such images (of sunlight on the walls
of her home), of course, are of a piece with the drama that unfolds in
a darkened chamber where the Cartesian subject is born: photography
re-stages in an allegorical register, the illumination of a self
conceived almost literally as refracted or projected light."
Brian Dillon, writing about the photographer Uta
Barth, in "Portfolio"
magazine #48 (December 2008) page 42.
November 2008:
Photography has particular qualities
thanks to its profoundly anarchic character and its unique relationship
with reality, a relationship which has little to do with truth, visual
or otherwise, but everything to do with the emotional charge generated
by the photograph's operation as a memory trace.
"The notion that photography might be creative
was confined primarily to the entrenched bastion of the amateur club,
with their 'rules of thirds', annual salons, and circuit judges of
formidably narrow minds."
Gerry Badger "Through the Looking
Glass - Photographic Art in Britain 1945 - 1989" Barbican Art Gallery
1989 page 24
August
2007:
"Sighting
familiar objects, scenes, friends or fun through a little window and
clicking a small key are obviously child's play,
and the ensuing
childish results offer the vastest possibilities for innocent amusement
and practical exploitation by advertisers,
camera clubs, photographic
year books, salons and prizes."
Lincoln
Kerstein - essay in Walker
Evans 'American Photographs' MOMA (2nd ed 1962 p 189)
August
2006:
As its best photography appearsnot to be
characterised by the absence of stereotypes but a kind of hesitation
between them.
John Stezaker 'Fragments' 1978.
March
2006:
Although
photography is intimately linked to the passage of time, to
mutability and alienation, it also promises escape into permanence with
moments able to last for ever.
John Taylor "A Dream of England" -
Manchester Univ Press.
January
2006:
The umbilical cord linking
the photograph to
its referent has been well and truly broken.
Jane Fletcher - "Portfolio"
No. 42 page 10
September
2005:
Photography: a bastard left
on the doorsteps
of art by industry".
Anonymous
July
2005:
"Amateur Photographers'
clubs are places
where one gets high on the Structural complexities of cameras, where
one goes on a photographic trip. They are post-industrial opium dens".
"Be explicit to yourself of
what your
criteria are".
Lez Well
Lecturer in History of
Photography -
University of Exeter
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- March
2005:
Sally
Mann said:
“My new work is
far less iconic, less
stylised. The photographs are filled with the detritus of every day
life.”
