EXCERPTS FROM PHOTOGRAPHER'S STORIES
“I remember opening my mouth in amazement, but before anything came out, in the next instant my three-year-old son, who was wearing nothing but a pair of bright red swim trunks, ran under the apple tree and stopped with his back to me in the middle of the smoke cloud, stretching his arms out wide so the smoky rays streamed through his fingers as his body became part of the sunburst. For just a moment he stood basking in the center of the light like a tiny monk beholding The Answer.
My camera was on the picnic table about two steps from my right hand. I half-turned toward it, then stopped because I saw that the scene was only going to last another second--it was fading already--and now the smoke drifted on through the tree and the sunburst evaporated, and Emerson turned and ran back to his friends. That was it. I looked around. No one else had noticed it. The whole spectacle had lasted just a few seconds.”
-Chris Jordan
“On the day that we were to receive our daughter, I decided to shoot video instead. I set up the cheap camera on a tripod and pointed it to the location where we were standing in the orphanage. On the recording my wife and I are seen smiling nervously with anticipation. You hear a nurse walk into the room, my wife shrieks with joy, opens her arms, and we both step out of the frame. The single most remarkable event of our life was documented only in audio. Perhaps the mystery only makes it more meaningful.”
-Alec Soth
“That night, something I witnessed stayed with me: a glimpse of my mother through the wide open door of their bedroom. She was wearing her torn nightgown and a single sock, posing suggestively for my father as he took her picture.
Years later, I found my father’s picture from that night in a stack of discarded snapshots in our junk drawer. It was like something out of a “Reader’s Wives” section in a porno mag. That’s definitely where this kind of image comes from.
Somehow we have moments saved forever in that drawer that you’d think a family wouldn’t want to remember. The photo remained there for years and years. Occasionally, it would migrate to the top of the drawer. I’ve since swiped it.”
-Todd Hido
“My camera, a mahogany box which takes 8x10 film, is in the back; the sheet film lies nestled in its cooler. I feel the pull to take a picture in this extraordinary light, a pull made more acute by that nagging awareness that things are never quite the same twice. I stop participating in the word game; the sound of it moves further into the back seats. I want to speak to the driver and I practice the words. In my mind I can hear myself, “Please stop, I’ll only be a moment. Stop here in front of this billboard advertising those mountains and their offer of sunny, safe happy family style recreation. And please, hold the flashlight, hand me the lens, the dark cloth, the carpenter’s level.”
---
“It is not too late,” says the voice in my head. But I do not speak. The sound of my voice does not interrupt the river of time, does not change the flow of the action or the encounters we will have that evening. I do not intercept time by making a photograph; its pulse continues unaltered. We pass the billboard and I console myself in two ways. First, I know that most photographs taken are a gamble at best. Second and more important: I remind myself to find the pleasure in this moment, a time in which the red sky passes to black, children create unanticipated rhymes, and the stars fall closer to earth.”
-Laura McPhee
“As I approached the house, I heard it crackling, sizzling and wheezing. The air smelled burnt. The ground rumbled. It would all be gone in minutes. Just as I was raising my camera to my eye, a truck roared into the driveway.
A man jumped out of the truck and ran into the yard. He fell to his knees, put his hands on his head, and began crying.
Helpless, he watched the fire destroy his house and everything inside it. And I watched him.”
-Christian Patterson
“I often wonder about the many, many images I will never make of John. What they may have looked like individually and how over the years of our marriage and our life the absence of these images will effect they way that we remember how we were.
They could exist but they don’t. They exist only in memory and the past.”
-Amy Stein
“As we were talking a group of girls from a local charity came into the room and together they began to sing. It was a haunting, spiritual and utterly captivating sound that filled the small room. The girls, including Priscilla, began to cry as they sang. For the first time in my career, I felt physically unable to take a photograph.
No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way. A photograph could not have conveyed the horrors that Priscilla had experienced in her short life nor her acknowledgement that she would soon be leaving this world.”
-Simon Roberts
“I remember opening my mouth in amazement, but before anything came out, in the next instant my three-year-old son, who was wearing nothing but a pair of bright red swim trunks, ran under the apple tree and stopped with his back to me in the middle of the smoke cloud, stretching his arms out wide so the smoky rays streamed through his fingers as his body became part of the sunburst. For just a moment he stood basking in the center of the light like a tiny monk beholding The Answer.
My camera was on the picnic table about two steps from my right hand. I half-turned toward it, then stopped because I saw that the scene was only going to last another second--it was fading already--and now the smoke drifted on through the tree and the sunburst evaporated, and Emerson turned and ran back to his friends. That was it. I looked around. No one else had noticed it. The whole spectacle had lasted just a few seconds.”
-Chris Jordan
“On the day that we were to receive our daughter, I decided to shoot video instead. I set up the cheap camera on a tripod and pointed it to the location where we were standing in the orphanage. On the recording my wife and I are seen smiling nervously with anticipation. You hear a nurse walk into the room, my wife shrieks with joy, opens her arms, and we both step out of the frame. The single most remarkable event of our life was documented only in audio. Perhaps the mystery only makes it more meaningful.”
-Alec Soth
“That night, something I witnessed stayed with me: a glimpse of my mother through the wide open door of their bedroom. She was wearing her torn nightgown and a single sock, posing suggestively for my father as he took her picture.
Years later, I found my father’s picture from that night in a stack of discarded snapshots in our junk drawer. It was like something out of a “Reader’s Wives” section in a porno mag. That’s definitely where this kind of image comes from.
Somehow we have moments saved forever in that drawer that you’d think a family wouldn’t want to remember. The photo remained there for years and years. Occasionally, it would migrate to the top of the drawer. I’ve since swiped it.”
-Todd Hido
“My camera, a mahogany box which takes 8x10 film, is in the back; the sheet film lies nestled in its cooler. I feel the pull to take a picture in this extraordinary light, a pull made more acute by that nagging awareness that things are never quite the same twice. I stop participating in the word game; the sound of it moves further into the back seats. I want to speak to the driver and I practice the words. In my mind I can hear myself, “Please stop, I’ll only be a moment. Stop here in front of this billboard advertising those mountains and their offer of sunny, safe happy family style recreation. And please, hold the flashlight, hand me the lens, the dark cloth, the carpenter’s level.”
---
“It is not too late,” says the voice in my head. But I do not speak. The sound of my voice does not interrupt the river of time, does not change the flow of the action or the encounters we will have that evening. I do not intercept time by making a photograph; its pulse continues unaltered. We pass the billboard and I console myself in two ways. First, I know that most photographs taken are a gamble at best. Second and more important: I remind myself to find the pleasure in this moment, a time in which the red sky passes to black, children create unanticipated rhymes, and the stars fall closer to earth.”
-Laura McPhee
“As I approached the house, I heard it crackling, sizzling and wheezing. The air smelled burnt. The ground rumbled. It would all be gone in minutes. Just as I was raising my camera to my eye, a truck roared into the driveway.
A man jumped out of the truck and ran into the yard. He fell to his knees, put his hands on his head, and began crying.
Helpless, he watched the fire destroy his house and everything inside it. And I watched him.”
-Christian Patterson
“I often wonder about the many, many images I will never make of John. What they may have looked like individually and how over the years of our marriage and our life the absence of these images will effect they way that we remember how we were.
They could exist but they don’t. They exist only in memory and the past.”
-Amy Stein
“As we were talking a group of girls from a local charity came into the room and together they began to sing. It was a haunting, spiritual and utterly captivating sound that filled the small room. The girls, including Priscilla, began to cry as they sang. For the first time in my career, I felt physically unable to take a photograph.
No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way. A photograph could not have conveyed the horrors that Priscilla had experienced in her short life nor her acknowledgement that she would soon be leaving this world.”
-Simon Roberts
