I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.
Interpretation
Photography is a tool for understanding the world and documenting one's era.
In this quote, Paul Strand expresses his desire to remain vigilant and engaged with the world around him. He views photography not merely as a means of artistic expression, but as a method of investigation and a way to chronicle the social and cultural dynamics of his time, emphasizing the importance of being aware and reflective in the creative process.
In practice
In a photography workshop, I shared this quote to inspire participants to be more observant.
The photographer's problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the pre-requisite of a living expression. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.
No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasnβt destroyed them.
It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.
The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.
When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice -- and many voices have to be suggested.
The way a character looks reflects what's on the inside. I can make myself look really bad, and I can make myself look kind of gorgeous. It's not about me; it's about the character.
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.
Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.
When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.
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