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 hasn’t 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.
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.
Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.
The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.
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