Re: Blind photographer

Jean Daubas wrote:

> This leads him (and us!) to the question :is not photography only a mental
> image of the world and only that ? A sensual effect whose the photographic
> paper print would be only a secondary phenomenon...?

Very true. This of course applies very much to pinhole photography. But I
think that it also applies to lens photography, and not just in the field of
commercial/advertising where the photographer's role has essentially been
reduced to shooting "exactly" the mental image of the art director.

Think of the word "Pre-visualization" that pervades all the Photo-101 or Zone
System textbooks. Pre-visualization implies that you have a mental image of
what it is that you'd like to see on your negative/positive.

The challenge, sometime, is to get that mental image in the first place, as
opposed to the "Blank Page Syndrome"... -:))

Jean: thanks for the references.

Joao: Yes, we're going blind when shooting (actually, the way it might be said
is "We should go blind when shooting"...). I have a variety of pinhole cameras,
one of them has a viewfinder in it. I keep using it to get the composition that
I want. But I find that I often get more creative results from the cameras
where I shoot without framing in the viewfinder.

Cheers,

Guy
Received on Tue Oct 23 10:34:39 2001