"I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is seeing people in new ways."
- Duane Michals
When you look at a photograph, do you just stare at it for a moment and then move on, or do you look at it and try to come up with stories for the photo? What are the people are doing, wearing, and where are they? And the fun of this, when you look at photos that you see on the internet or in someone's scrapbook is that you can guess and you won't really have a sure answer. Which leaves room for more guessing.
"I believe in imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see."
- Duane Michals
"Seeing is believing."
There are things like love - things we cannot see, but want to believe in. And, well, who doesn't find love important?
Imagination has no limit. We can explore and find new things infinitely. The things we can see have a maximum, and when we hit that we are at a loss for what else to do. The things we imagine are in an alternate reality, where anything can be what it wants to become.
"Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It's an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world."
- Arnold Newman
With photography, we record memories that we want a record of. Mostly this means happy memories (have you ever seen people take photos at a funeral?). No one would want to remember the sadness if they could help it.
But when we hold a stack of photos, and others look through it, it's our own world that we create - who is in it, the places we've been, and all the things that we find important. People may go through our stack of photos and wonder why we have a particular photo, because to the others it will seem worthless, when that may be the most important memory to you.
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