On Approach
Photography should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.
Photography is about discovering things hitherto unseen. Otherwise there’s no point to the process.
By all means be experimental, but let the viewer be part of the experiment.
Photograph obscure things but don’t photograph obscurely.
There is a certain merit in leaving some parts of your images obscure.
On Structure
In the nineteenth century the omniscient author was God: totalitarian and monolithic. The twentieth century, with all its horrors, was more demotic. It took in people’s accounts; suddenly there were other views. In the natural sciences the twentieth century saw the disproving of Newton and the introduction of the notion of relativity. Now, we know that the observer always affects what is being observed. So, photographing now, you have to reveal your approach.
Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
There is a species of photographer, the chronicler; he’s dispassionate, he’s seen it all. It’s not good.
On Description
You need to set things very thoroughly in time and place unless you have good reasons not to.
Photographers are often too worried about getting things moving on the rails, and not worried enough about what’s on either side of the tracks.
A sense of place distinguishes a piece of photography. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place.
Meteorology is not superfluous to the story. Don’t have an aversion to noticing the weather. Martin Parr also says, ‘wait for rain. It makes shooting on the street easier and more interesting.’
It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right in photography. The important thing is that it should work for the viewer, even if it is not accurate. You can use ellipsis (ommission), abbreviate a sequence of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe everything.
You sometimes need to magnify something, describe it amply in a roundabout way. And in the process you discover something.
On Detail
Significant detail enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.
Oddities are interesting.
Characters need details that will anchor themselves in your mind.
The use of twins or triplets who are virtually indistinguishable from each other can lend a spooky, uncanny edge. Kafka does it. Diane Arbus did it.
Exaggeration is the stuff of comedy.
It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognised pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies. Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognised.
On Reading and Intertextuality
Read books that have nothing to do with photography (or literature).
Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.
There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.
You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.
I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.
Don’t be afraid to bring in strange things and graft them into your story. It enriches it. Add text. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.
Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.It’s very good that you photograph or write through another work, a foil, so that you photograph or write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.
A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In photography, limitation gives freedom.
If you look carefully you can find problems in all photographers and writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.
On Style
Every photograph taken by itself should mean something.
Photography should not create the impression that the photographer is trying to be ‘poetic’.
It’s easy to make rhythmical pictures. It carries you along. After a while it gets tedious.
Avoid photographs that serve only to set up later photographs.
On Revision
Don’t revise your edit too much or it turns into patchwork.
Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.
Don’t listen to anyone. It’s fatal.
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