Sam Abell Quotes
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Above all, it's hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.
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In the last workshop I taught, a woman flew in from Thailand. She's a medical doctor in Bangkok. I asked her in her one-on-one session where she wanted photography to be in her life.Did she want a second career? Was it about earning money? Or was it art? And she said "None of those. I want photography to be serious in my life." It would be like someone wanting music, like piano playing, to be a richer, deeper, and maybe even harder experience.
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There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.
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There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.
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How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.
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I was known as a 35-mm photographer with a view-camera mentality.
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It actually has transcended my career at the Geographic, so that when my career there ended, I had momentum as a teacher, and a belief in photographic education at the workshop level.
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The thing with my workshops is, photography is a thoughtful process. In an atmosphere of fast photography, and generally thoughtless, quick, automatic photography, I think that there is an interest in the slowed down, thoughtful approach.
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What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.
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Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
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The class that I teach is called "The Life of a Photograph." It takes up the question, of the billion photographs that were taken today, how many will have a life, and why? So the new reality has made the question more pertinent, not less pertinent.
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'Woman on the Plaza,' with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs - an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.
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When I first went to 'National Geographic,' I thought I was the least qualified person to step through the doors. But because of my parents and the culture of continual learning they imposed on us, I later came to believe I was the most qualified person who ever worked there.
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For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way.
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Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.
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One of the things that I most believe in is the compose and wait philosophy of photography. It’s a very satisfying, almost spiritual way to photograph. Life isn't’ knocking you around, life isn't controlling you. You have picked your place, you’ve picked your scene, you’ve picked your light, you’ve done all the decision making and you are waiting for the moment to come to you.
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For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture, Japan. And for all-around affection, Australia.
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For example, in my dorm, at the University of Kentucky, I had the only camera. I don't think anyone came to college with a camera, other than me.
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My connection to Santa Fe is very closely, and continuously a connection with Reid. I believe in him and his philosophy of photographic education.
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First of all, I appropriate photographs.In presenting the Richard Prince photograph I tried to be as neutral as I could be. I put down the fact of it. I wanted it to be the same thing he wanted it to be, an open ended invitation to think about authorship, and who owns a created work. So I pair it with my appropriated picture.
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And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures.
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As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.
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I had luck, but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.
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The reason I don't want to say anything about it is it has a strange power to take over the conversation. Just like it's doing with us. I was asked to participate in a documentary about Richard Prince, and be the voice of someone who was appropriated, and I declined. The reason I did is I don't want it to be the subject of the discussion of my work.
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I will just say, appropriation is an intellectual idea until it happens to you. It's a philosophy, and it's got its own intellectual framework. Then there's what happens when it's your photograph. Then it's personal, and that's all I'll say.
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Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.
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I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
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This might seem off the track, but an interesting thing to me that others could talk about better than I, but one of the growth areas in photographic education has been the so-called slow photography.
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Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
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It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
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