Notre-Dame By Night
Last year I was able to attend the Diane Arbus exhibition at Jeu de Paume in Paris. While it was interesting and I admired many of the images, I must confess that it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Almost the entire collection was dedicated to portraits of the marginalized, transvestites, intellectually handicapped and deformed. By the time I reached what turned out to be a very lengthy exhibition it had all become a bit too much. There was a quote on printed on a wall which has stuck with me a while.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Diane Arbus 1971
I found this quote rather puzzling. Did she make up these words to perplex people? Or because it simply sounds kind of cool? The words have started to make more sense lately. Every photograph can tell truths or lies and sometimes both. The viewer won’t know the difference and it’s all part of the enigma of the art.
I don’t use composites and almost all my work consists of straight shots from a single RAW file processed through a workflow that takes 5-10 minutes. Even though my approach is somewhat more purist than most, I can easily manipulate a situation to tell the story I want.
Take this photo of a lady with her umbrella on a rainy night in front of Notre-Dame. She was talking on her mobile phone and spent about 15 minutes on the quay, mainly with her back turned to the river. She turned around to face the cathedral long enough for me to shoot a few frames. Does knowing this change how you initially felt about the photograph? When you see an image, you don’t really know about the event, the context or how the photographer decided to interpret it. I think this was what Diane Arbus was alluding to. Personally, I feel that sometimes we talk so much about what went on behind the scenes that it takes the intrigue out of our own photography.
Large version of Notre-Dame by Night
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