she danced naked on the hood of the getaway car while her man did all the dirty work
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Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
-Garry Winogrand
I couldn’t agree less with Garry Winogrand’s “photography is…” statement. Photography is all about the thing being photographed. It’s the subject’s soul, whether a dignitary or a donut, which must transcend it’s three dimensional state and make it into the heart or gut of the viewer. Example…an innocent and beautiful child can be made, by a creative photographer, to look wretched and sinister. The hook of the photo, however, the thing that will grab us by our more civilized sensibilities and make us flabbergasted (and awe-inspired in certain cases) will be the glaring juxtaposition of innocence and darkness. If we didn’t implicitly know that the underlying subject, the child, was goodness defined, then the photo wouldn’t make nearly the heavy impact that it would otherwise…regardless of how the child looked in the photo. The soul of the subject has to come through the page. Plain and simple. It is only then that we can truly appreciate the “how the subject looks photographed” portion of the equation.
