I didn't really get serious till I was 48. Eight years later I am almost at the minor plan drafting stage. Masterplan still a way off... After looking at lots of photographs and taking thousands I am just beginning to realise the dictum that you should ignore everything you read and hear and make the pictures that matter to you. But I think you have to go the way of soaking in so much to determine what pictures matter to you. Even Picasso could be so taken by a Matisse painting that he would have to borrow it for two weeks. Specialisation and focus are the mantras for photography and science. But that is boring. A uniform style is perhaps a commercial necessity. But Elliot Erwitt took lots of different types of photographs. Here is Luigi Ghirri on 'style':
"Certain maniacal aspects seem dangerous to me: photography is the aphasia of seeing, the antechamber of the anaesthetization of the glance, [gaze?]* the need to be original and creative at all costs, the desperate search for the new and for a trademark, in the belief that an artist can be recognized by the visual editing he imprints on the outside world. Instead of trying to introduce new tempos and modalities, photography has entered the rigid space of the reproduction itself. Perhaps Shakespeare’s pronouncement is valid here: “What an infinite mock is this, that a man should have the best use of eyes to see the way of blindness.”
Luigi Ghirri: The Open Work 1984 (The Complete Essays 1973–1991)
*I think the translator should have used 'gaze' here.
