Random Readings

Snowdon

"I like to direct my subjects and tell them exactly what to do.  It is not always a matter of making people feel totally at ease.  Often the only way one can break through someone's prepared face is to make them slightly uncomfortable, physically or mentally.  Sometimes people can be awkard or ill at ease in a way that expresses themselves better than when they are relaxed.  I may, perhaps, ask them to hold a pose for longer than is natural, or I make a remark about the sitter or their work that surprises them, and then watch for their immediate reaction.  On the other hand, I sometimes ask someone to move fractionally, not because I know what I want them to do, but simply because I do not like what I'm seeing and if the person moved I might like it more.  Only when things are going badly do I use the tactic of talking; it is a conscious and artificial device and I only listen to what is said in the hopes that an idea will come out of it; sometimes I leave the sitter alone for a few minutes to change the mood."
Snowdon, 1984. Sittings 1979-1983. Paperback. London. Wiedenfeld & Nicholson

How Fictional are Photographs? by Colin Graham

“Exploring the connection between the literary and the photographic can end up turning on two related paradoxes.”

1.    The notion ‘fiction’ tries to split photography between the real and the fictional.
2.    The photograph is an instant, whereas the literary tells a story that takes place in time.  Yet a photograph can imply a story and writing can describe an instant.  We read photographs in the context of the photographs and stories that have gone before.

A photograph is not the subject, but a trace of the subject.  The trace implies the subject, which existed within time and is the result of some passage of time.  Yet we see the image first then infer the subject so the normal chronology is reversed.  “Photographs … are not the thing they purport to be, and come before the thing they purport to come after.”

 

The article contains sentences complicated by a Roland Barthes-ian parentheticality:

"This doubled narrativity is a useful way to think, askew, of the fictionality of the photograph, so that we ask not if it mirrors reality, or if its chance of reflecting a truth is perverted by the power which produces or distributes the image, but instead we recognise this backwards-unravelling story which is in every photograph, as it appears, now, to show us then."

Graham, C., 2013. How Fictional are Photographs? Source, The Photographic Review, Summer 2013, 75, pp.40-41

Lee Miller on Portraiture

"She dislikes having any friend come along with her clients because, she explains, 'They always give a person and "audience complex", or make him or her wear a "gallery smile", and both are unnatural."
"And a good photograph is just that, to catch a person not when he is aware of it but when he is his natural self."
Article first published in the Poughkeepsie Star, 1/11/1932.

Diane Arbus on Photographs

"They are the proof that something was there and no longer is.  Like a stain.  And the stillness of them is boggling.  You can turn away but when you come back they'll still be there, looking at you."
March 1971.  Probably in "Diane Arbus", 1972, New Yourk, Aperture.