creativity

Understanding photography through quotes and inspiration

I mostly write on here about the business of photography, photographic techniques and photographic equipment. Every once in a while I will indulge myself and wander off into simply thinking about photography and see where a few paragraphs take me. With that in mid, let’s go.

In early December we were on holiday in Venice and whilst wandering around some of the beautiful back streets of one of our absolute favourite cities we stumbled across a small gallery showing the work of two British artists so we went in. We were lucky enough to met them and in chatting about galleries, art and shows to see they told us that there was a major exhibition of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe showing for a limited time at Le Stanza della Fotografia on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Immediately I have three thoughts here: The show was wonderful as you would expect from such a famous photographer. Secondly, the gallery was itself gorgeous and probably one of the best dedicated spaces for showing photography anywhere that I’ve been. Thirdly, and finally, I kept my ticket and it has been sitting on my desk since we returned home. You can see above that the reverse side has a quote from Helmut Newton “Photography is always a way of seducing”. There were several quotes on the backs of people’s tickets but this one was mine. My wife got Josef Koudelka’s ” The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make positive”.

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Juxtapose and exaggerate
Not the original note to self but I have added it to a lens wrap for old time’s sake

A few days ago I was at an event in Manchester run by Canon UK. While I was chatting with one of the many talented young photographers that they had invited I remembered something about my early career that I am pretty sure helped me more than I could have known at the time.

In the later 1980s and early 1990s I had a light grey Domke F1X camera bag. I loved that bag and I loved working from it. I also loved that every time I lifted the top flap there were two words written there with a marker pen:

  • Juxtapose
  • Exaggerate

They were written there because the legendary photographer Terence Donovan gave a talk at my college in either 1985 or 1986. When asked by one of my classmates about taking better pictures, he explained that by juxtaposing our subjects with backgrounds, secondary subjects and other compositional elements we could give our pictures a depth that told stories more effectively. By exaggerating things such as light, angles, perspective or even the contents of our images we could, again, tell those stories in different and possibly better ways. I scribbled down those two words in my almost brand new Filofax, underlining both multiple times.

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