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[...]
It's as if my hand were a camera.
If it were possible, I'd want no mechanism between me and the moment
of photographing. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life
as talking or eating or sex. The instant of photographing, instead
of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection
for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature
a voyeur, the last one invited to the party.
My desire is to preserve the sense of peoples' lives, to
endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I
want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to
show exactly what my world looks like, without
glamorization, without glorification. This is not a bleak
world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a
quality of introspection.
We all tell stories which are versions of
history-memorized, encapsulated, repeatable, and safe.
Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an
invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical
presence, the density and flavor of life. Memory allows
an endless flow of connections. Stories can be rewritten,
memory can't. If each picture is a story, then the
accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the
experience of memory, a story without end.
[...]
* read the full story
from the designautopsy project
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