Photolocutions...

Monday. Back at work. Thinking in pictures. Dwelling on options, alternatives...reality and constraints. Pause. Read a few photoblogs...and found some worthwhile wordy pictograms from some icons in the field.

Antoine d' Agata:
"I don’t believe in photography as art or a job or anything. I think of photography as a language and I think a language should be used to speak, to say what you have to say. So the only things I have to say about my life and what I know about the world, is the way I see it. So, it’s not about photography… I think people should just use photography to say things and not just photography for the sake of photography… The world is full of talented photographers. The problem is just so many of them just don’t know what to say, they think life is one thing and photography is another but they don’t realize that photography is just a way to reflect what you are."

Joel Meyerowitz:
"I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it 's got lots of accounting going on in it - stones and buildings and trees and air - but that 's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there."

Agata's framing of photography as a fluency, a language of self-expression made think, for a long time. Then I felt at a loss for words. Meyerowitz's talk of space and the challenge of evoking emotion made me wonder about scarcity and exuberance. Then I felt a bit of cabin fever.

So, I went for a walk, and remembered a series of lines from an article written by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. The article, written decades ago is titled, "The Difficulty of Reading." I do not recall the precise quote, but Ortega y Gasset wrote about the nature of language, and the act of reading. He wrote about how reading was always a negotiation between a text that said too much and too little...an act that teased and tantalized...indeterminacy and meaning.

I felt wedged between a philosophical banality and an alluring photographic arrogance. I kept walking and thought to myself...depressing the shutter is a brief, but complicated enterprise.

Still Monday. Back to work.