In my Solitude
Lately I've been feeling the urge to write things down - not so much for others to read but for myself perhaps at a later point to organize and understand.
Reading Susan Sontag has been moving me in certain ways and I am not so sure (yet) if I can appreciate those emotions or not.
In one of her books, towards the end, there's a quotation I've come across.
I did not know whose quote it was but after reading into the first sentence I thought to myself, that this must be Richard Avedon's, which turned out to be true, as I turned the page.
I never really cared too much for his work, as much as I hate to admit it, until I've seen "In The American West" .
"I always prefer to work in the studio.It isolates people from their environment....
The concentration has to come from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it's unearned. It has no past...no future. And when the sitting is over-when the picture is done-there's nothing left except the photograph...the photograph and a kind of embarassment. They leave...and I don't know them. I've hardly heard what they said. If I meet them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won't recognize me. Because I don't feel I was really there. At least that part of me was...is now in the photograph. And the photographs have a reality for me that the people don't. It's through the photographs that I know them."
-Richard Avedon
By writing this , he somehow scratched the surface of something I've been experiencing during and after photographing someone.
Not that I care so much if the person I've once photographed would recognize me or remember me even ... it's more the shift from that intense moment, sometimes long and at other times short, into this solitude.
It's not the kind of solitude that the presence of a person ,lover, friend or stranger could stand in for.
It's a solitude so indescribable that nothing will make it go away.
Or perhaps taking another photograph could ?
It's like getting my heart broken each and every time - but I'd never ask you not to.
Reading Susan Sontag has been moving me in certain ways and I am not so sure (yet) if I can appreciate those emotions or not.
In one of her books, towards the end, there's a quotation I've come across.
I did not know whose quote it was but after reading into the first sentence I thought to myself, that this must be Richard Avedon's, which turned out to be true, as I turned the page.
I never really cared too much for his work, as much as I hate to admit it, until I've seen "In The American West" .
"I always prefer to work in the studio.It isolates people from their environment....
The concentration has to come from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it's unearned. It has no past...no future. And when the sitting is over-when the picture is done-there's nothing left except the photograph...the photograph and a kind of embarassment. They leave...and I don't know them. I've hardly heard what they said. If I meet them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won't recognize me. Because I don't feel I was really there. At least that part of me was...is now in the photograph. And the photographs have a reality for me that the people don't. It's through the photographs that I know them."
-Richard Avedon
By writing this , he somehow scratched the surface of something I've been experiencing during and after photographing someone.
Not that I care so much if the person I've once photographed would recognize me or remember me even ... it's more the shift from that intense moment, sometimes long and at other times short, into this solitude.
It's not the kind of solitude that the presence of a person ,lover, friend or stranger could stand in for.
It's a solitude so indescribable that nothing will make it go away.
Or perhaps taking another photograph could ?
It's like getting my heart broken each and every time - but I'd never ask you not to.
posted by Beatrice Neumann at 10:06 PM
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