It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things.... But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to kee...p on looking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent ...by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's--as opposed to the painter's--mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He does not create his object in reality as does the painter, but he creates, before the camera begins to function, the irrevocabl...y ultimate aesthetic form. He carries the notion of the shape of an object in himself and he takes the object destined for that form, giving it a certain position or moving it into a certain situation of light, in a certain relation to space.... The photographer's artistic performance is thus displayed in pre-photographic and in post-photographic action; in the preparation for real photographic action and in the reproduction of the photograph. The painter recreates his object from beginning to end ... through his activity, through his painting. The photographer, it is true, changes his object, too, by his photographic action ... he gives the convincing shape, most clearly adequate to his perception, before, and he fixes this shape in a mechanistic way.... Whereas the painter remains creative from first to last, the creative activity of the photographer is confined and limited; whereas the artistic action of the painter is not interrupted, the artistic action of the photographer breaks off in the moment in which the apparatus is to fix and make visible its effect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gonzo journalism ... is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any ki...nd of journalism--and the best journalists have always known this.... True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it--or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Part of the portrait painter's art, we must be careful to note, is to produce a sort of synthesis, something more various, richer,... than even an astute photographer (now or yesterday) can catch by snapping a shutter in a camera. The portrait painter must be skilled in human observation, he must actually be moved by his subject as well as by his profession. True, an ambitious photographer might spend as much clock time as a painter in "studying" his subject, looking for the right shade of mood and the right chiaroscuro to articulate it. Yet this method, the photographic one, must necessarily rely too much on the subject's timed cooperation, since, materially speaking, all the photographer can record is a single moment, no matter how tactically approached and psychologically prepared that moment be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »