Girl looking at Models, Orchard Rd, Singapore

“Much has been said about the clarity of photography, but little has been said about its obscurity. And yet it is photography that has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point, and has shown us pictures that give the sense of the scene, while withholding its narrative meaning.”

• John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye

Bloke Waiting for the Bus, Chinatown, Singapore

“In the days of slow films and slow lenses, photographs described a time segment of several seconds or more. If the subject moved, images resulted that had never been seen before: dogs with two heads and a sheaf of tails, faces without features, transparent men, spreading their diluted substance half across the plate. The fact that these pictures were considered (at best) as partial failures is less interesting than the fact that they were produced in quantity … It is surprising that the prevalence of these radical images has not been of interest to art historians.”

• John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye

Bloke, Sipping Soup, Peoples Park Complex, Singapore

“There is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time. This time is always the present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.”

• John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye

Lady, Peoples Park Complex, Singapore

“The edges of the picture were seldom neat. Parts of figures or buildings or features of landscape were truncated, leaving a shape belonging not to the subject, but (if the picture was a good one) to the balance, the propriety, of the image. The photographer looked at the world as though it were a scroll painting, unrolled from hand to hand, exhibiting an infinite number of croppings —of compositions—as the frame moved onwards.”

• John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye

Kid on a bus, Singapore

“Most of this deluge of pictures seemed formless and accidental, but some achieved coherence, even in their strangeness. Some of the new images were memorable, and seemed significant beyond their limited intention. These remembered pictures enlarged one's sense of possibilities as he looked again at the real world. While they were remembered they survived, like organisms, to reproduce and evolve.

But it was not only the way that photography described things that was new; it was also the things it chose to describe. Photographers shot "...objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes... without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this or that artistic?" Painting was difficult, expensive, and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance. By the end of the century, for the first time in history, even the poor man knew what his ancestors had looked like.”

• John Szarkowski, The Photgrapher’s `Eye

Joy

“But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer's problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.”

• John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye

Looking At Salgado, Singapore

“I walk a lot, I do some of my reporting on foot because I use the time to look around and to feel life, to feel nature. Slowly. If we don’t do it slowly, we end up burning out. Most often, the essence lies in the curves, in the twists and turns of the journey, not in the straight lines.” 

He compares photographers to hunters because they both live in waiting, fully immersed in their own authentic processes. 

“We must experience the pleasure of waiting.”

Alejandra de Argos, Genesis by Sebastiao Salgado

I am fortunate to have a ticket to hear him speak at the National Museum of Singapore on 18 May.

Looking At Salgado, Singapore

"He initially considering documenting environmental degradation and global warming, but instead embarked upon an eight year project to explore and document what he terms the 46% of the globe that remains ecologically intact. He pointedly included the indigenous peoples still living close to the earth, relatively untouched by industrialization. This was a monumental project for the photographer, involving four months-long expeditions a year for eight consecutive years, complicated by a bout of malaria."

'Genesis' by Sebastiao Salgado, reviewed by Geoffrey Wittig, The Online Photographer