The Dominican Republic: #7 Roadside Butcher
Photograph by Nichol Sepanek – nicholphoto.com
Quotes: Mary Ellen Mark
“I think you reveal yourself by what you choose to photograph, but I prefer photographs that tell more about the subject. There’s nothing much interesting to tell about me; what’s interesting is the person I’m photographing, and that’s what I try to show. … I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world… that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture. ”
-Mary Ellen Mark
The Dominican Republic: #6 Untitled
Photograph by Nichol Sepanek – nicholphoto.com
Quotes: Robert Mapplethorpe
If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.
-Robert Mapplethorpe
The Dominican Republic: #5 Street Vendor
Photograph by Nichol Sepanek – nicholphoto.com
The Dominican Republic: #4 School Children
Photograph by Nichol Sepanek – nicholphoto.com
Photography 2.0
A group of teenagers sit in a cluster on the floor of an airport lounge photographing each other with cell phones and giggling. A man takes a picture of everything he eats that day and posts the results on his blog.Across the globe amateur photographers are recording and preserving the mind-numbing minutia of daily life. Births, birthday parties, cloud patterns, garbage on a street corner, the blur of traffic, or the neighbor’s dog. The result is an astounding collection of images adding up to hundreds of thousands of pictures every day.
Long ago was the practice of photography taken out of the hands of professionals and fine art image makers and re-packaged as a tool of the common place consumer. Photography as a practice has long mediated social relationships, has long been about documentation and ritual, about representation of the physical world, and about reality. It’s long been about taking the instantaneous moment and stretching it into the infinite. But the latest revolution in the taking, making, and sharing of images in such great volume seems somehow vastly different and much more significant.
What does this hold in store for the practice of photography, and what does it mean for those of us who make a living with a camera?
The Dominican Republic: #3 Elderly Man, Doctor’s Office
Photograph by Nichol Sepanek – nicholphoto.com
The Duality Of The Photograph
Is a photograph documentation or art? Self-expression or communication? Reality or illusion? A photograph can be all of these and more; but, most certainly, it is not an ‘either-or’ dichotomy. You cannot have a left without a right, a valley without a mountain; all dualities and seeming dichotomies are part of a whole.In her book “On Photography”, Susan Sontag observed, “The history of photography is punctuated by a series of dualistic controversies.”
Today these controversies might include film and digital. Clearly, photography is not about what camera you use. Digital capture is, now, almost universally accepted; although, not without controversy. An especially persistent notion: digital photographers can and will cheat; although there is little agreement on what constitutes “cheating.”
Before digital imaging there existed a slides versus prints controversy. At its core, this controversy was over where and when the photographic process ended. For printers the creative process does not end with the click of the shutter as it typically does for slide photographers. Printers have long continued the photographic process in the darkroom. Today, that process more often than not continues in the digital darkroom and so does the controversy.