{ Photo Paragraphs }
"It's not easy these days, making time for our creative work. Voices call us from everywhere demanding our attention, our energy. And many of us, somewhere along the line, got the message that making art is self-indulgent, so we relegate to the bottom of our list.... We got so caught up in the flurry of our lives that we forget the essential thing about art - that the art of creating is a healing gesture, as sacred as prayer, as essential to the spirit as food is to the body..."
"God Is at Eye Level", by Jan Phillips
"When I feel I am close I get closer; to remove everything from the frame that is extraneous and to scale down the photograph in hopes of achieving a simplicity that reveals only what I feel is in that person. I am so close that I cannot look the other way or hide behind anything. Then I am aware of an intensity of intimacy and understanding. I begin to sense who I am, and to perceive others the small expressions that helps to reveal a person's unique and essential quality."
"In the land of light - Israel, a Portrait of Its People", by Rodney Smith
"I began to photograph my daughter Lana Bernasek Kinnear, the moment she emerged from my wife's womb. Since then, I have been documenting her life and arrange the prints in nice albums that will one day become hers. It is family snapshot photography, really, but done with the loving care of a father who happens to be a serious hobbyist.
Your Contest led me to consider the nature of family snapshots and photo albums. If their purpose is to document our lives, then the albums I'm creating- like most others- are woefully incomplete since they contain documents of the happy times and exclude the sad ones. The bruise knees, the temper tantrums and the traumatic visits to the doctor's office are difficult to photograph, since these are precisely the times when I must set aside the camera and lend comfort to my child. But these scenes are excluded for larger reasons, too - reasons that get to this heart of this type of photography. I think we often make family snapshots to represent the way we want things to be, rather than the way they really are. We photograph the happy times so we can present these images to our friends, and to ourselves, as depictions of our wonderful lives; on some fundamental level, I think we use photography to create idealized versions of ourselves. In this, the family snapshots is similar to the well-crafted landscape photographs that grace calendars and coffee table books, In both cases, the photos are carefully created and edited to present the best possible views of the subjects, rather than showing them as they more regularly appear.
Do this mean that these photos are dishonest? Does it mean that, when I one day present the albums to my daughter- albums full of smiling faces and good times, nary a frown nor teardrop in sight- that I am deceiving her? I have been thinking about this lately, and recently ran for my camera while my daughter threw a crying fit. When I returned and put the camera to my eye, she stopped crying.
Does she now associate cameras with good times and reflexively react with a smile, or has she become my willing accomplice?"
-Doug Kinner, Fort
Collins, CO. ( from readers letter to Photo Technique USA Mar/Apr 2001 issue.)