Operated by John-Riley Harper. Dedicated to archiving photography from Utah's underground scenes, as well as other personal projects.

12.20.2004
Thinking Through My Photography
I've been having this continual struggle with camera sizes. Let me clarify: I look through my pictures, and it feels like the ones that have more FEELING were ones I took on my old small shitty cameras, and the one that I'm using right now, even though it makes me feel like a rockstar, lacks the intimacy that you can only get when you don't invade space as much. The fly on the wall, the invisible observer. But then I snap a photo that I fall in love with. So, I think I'll stick with it.

Oh it's such egoism. But maybe not, even if someone else takes a picture with my camera, I feel a strange connection to it. I feel part of it, because maybe I helped set a setting, or I was simply part of the experience. It's this power-tripped control that the photographer has to own the environment around them. I could of course be putting words into people's mouths, but I seriously can't see photographers that don't have an internal struggle going on inside about their 'art', because it REALLY is just stealing the photons from other places and pretending that you did something other than be in a certain place and push a button at a certain time. Remember, all around the earth, billions of people are taking beautiful pictures every second in their minds. The photographer simply publisizes one simple angle, frames it, glorifies it. It's kind of patheticly pedantic, quite unromantic.

But then, something comes along and completely inspires me. Check out this guy: http://www.mariolalich.com. Each and every one of his photographs has been carefully sculpted to make an idea that came out of his MIND, not the environment, manifest. It seems like he spends weeks or whatever time it takes to create one simple image, while I snap like a monkey gone mad, hoping that quantity will ensure quality in the end. And what's piss poor can be fixed more or less in a manifest of photoshop finesse.

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