We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.
The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose illness simulates the symptoms of other diseases – was transformed, through hypnosis, into an artificial hysteric who perfectly simulated the simulations of hysteria. The medical photograph becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a representation so far removed from the original that all duplicitous traits, were easily erased, leaving the deranged and chaotic nature of the original far behind. The photograph succeeded in turning the hysteric into a wholly artificial being, literally a flat, framed, unmoving image.
Why hoard away so many back-issues of People Magazine? Fashion magazines are just empty promises. You can go bankrupt blowing all your cash on expensive beauty products, but the only way you’ll ever look just like the people on those glossy front covers is if you know how to use computer editing software for photographs. Besides, people who think they are ugly, are never really all that ugly anyway. People who think they are pretty, are rarely ever all that pretty.
I used to be lost in us. Blurred were the lines that separated us. But now, I see our togetherness in our separateness. I see the you in me and the me in you. We are two independent beings who complement one another like photographs that are beautiful on their own but are enhanced when juxtaposed, creating an altogether new photograph.
The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.
Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
I stare past her at the inspirational kitten posters. There's one of a soaking-wet kitten climbing out of a toilet with the caption "it could be worse!""Just tell me whatever it is you're thinking," Mrs. Paulsen says. "Whatever is going through your mind right now.""I hope they didn't actually drop a cat in the toilet to get that picture," I choke out. "...Pardon?""Nothing. Sorry.
The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.
There, there, best to bring it all up,' she said. My memory was in shreds. Imagine a photograph cut into narrow strips then jumbled up. Everything is there, but you can't see the whole picture and even the strips have no bearing on reality. I did know I had consumed a large amount of alcohol. But I must have done something crazier than just being found drunk to have a nurse sitting by my bed. I thought it would be a good idea to say something and planned it for several seconds. 'She's all right,' I said. 'Who is?' asked the nurse. 'Alice. I'm all right now.' As I spoke I wondered if I had said something wrong. didn't sound like me. There were so many voices muttering in the background it was hard to tell.
Don't become a random photograph in the eyes of friends, and even your enemies, for each glance at your face will cause a declination of value and reputation. Create value, through scarcity.
Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.
There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.
Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph.
What do we feel when we look at a good photograph? We just want to be there, right at the exact moment that photo taken!
A good photograph never belongs to the past; every time you look at it, it is with you, it is alive and it is in the present moment!
Whenever we look at a photograph, the memories in the photograph become our memories as well!
Our photographs are our best proof to others that we lived the things we lived in the past!
Also, Willie, I dig telling the truth. Words can be twisted but a photo never lies.Sutton laughs.What’s funny? Photographer says.Nothing. Except—that’s pure horseshit kid. I can’t think of anything that lies more than a photo. In fact every photo is a dirty stinking lie because it’s a frozen moment—and time can’t be frozen. Some of the biggest lies I’ve ever run across have been photos. Some of them were of me.
There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?