A statement that worked well for losing a contest

In the comments of the earlier post, I was rightly called out for not having anything like a statement online. Here’s what I submitted with these photos for a fellowship competition earlier this year. I don’t represent it as anything other than that: a statement that was good enough not to win a contest. I did get something out of writing it, though.

I’m curious in an indefinite way about the lives of other people, so I make photography from life that is intended to suggest what a friend calls offhand narratives - entry points for imagination which are ambiguous and understated.

A successful photograph has enough realness to ground it and enough detail, dissonance or intrigue to be more than documentary. I try to inspire the slightly vertiginous feeling that: This exists. This is a life. Without the documentary constraint that what’s shown is precisely real life.

There are a lot of pitfalls in this kind of work, and I fall into them regularly. I sometimes don’t have the social energy or courage to engage people and get the access I need. When I do enter an exciting and complex situation, I don’t have enough experience to relax and visualize what I want to take from it, and instead often shoot too much with too little focus. And I sometimes fall back on irony and juxtaposition - obvious narrative - rather than the more equivocal and interesting.

The selection I am submitting today is a mix of portrait and street reportage which I hope conveys something about both what I have learned to do with photography thusfar and what I hope to say in the future.

You are currently reading “A statement that worked well for losing a contest,” an entry on slower.net weblog
Published in photography at
7pm, 3.14.06
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