About me:
I’m a retired engineer. Some of my interests besides photography have been foreign affairs, music (clarinet, violin), cosmology, big history, motorcycles, hiking, skiing, scuba diving and ocean kayaking. I can be contacted by combining larry.adamache with @telus.net
About photographic art:
Art is the product of craft and intuition/imagination. Artistic merit is subjective and a matter of the opinion of the individual observer – not critics, judges or academics. You should view art like you listen to music.
Minor White: “What usually destroys the experience of a photograph is to start criticizing it.”
“One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.”
“When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.”
Edward Weston: “you can teach a student how to look, but not how to see”
“I don’t know a thing about the rules of composition – I make my own – composition is the clearest and strongest way of seeing a subject”
“This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.”
Imogen Cunningham: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.”
Alfred Stieglitz: There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.”
Paul Strand: “All good art is abstract in its structure.”
Ansel Adams: “A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.”
Robert Adams: “Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.”
Robert Mapplethorpe: I always thought I was good. That’s why it was so frustrating when other people didn’t agree.”
Richard Benson: “I think there’s a real problem because we overintellectualize the things we make as artists..”
Bill Brandt: “A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned.” – “Photography is not a sport. It has no rules.”
Eliot Porter: “I don’t think it’s necessary to put your feelings about photography in words. I’ve read things that photographers have written for exhibitions and so forth about their subjective feelings about photography and mostly I think it’s disturbing. I think they’re fooling themselves very often. They’re just talking, they’re not saying anything.”
Julia Margaret Cameron: “What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?”
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the Real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and Beauty. ”
Sally Mann: “Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity… I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.”
W. Eugene Smith: “Available light is any damn light that is available!”
“I didn’t write the rules. Why would I follow them?”
Diane Arbus: “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.”
Ruth Bernhard: “You have to follow your instinct all the time. Otherwise you don’t make it.” “I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. “The photographs make themselves with my help.” “If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.”
Larry Adamache
Coldstream, BC, Canada