I'm writing an online book: Spontanious Photography.
Each page has a photo I took that illustrates the text below (in Hebrew and English) that deals with something that I think I understand about spontaneous fine art photography.
Here are some excerpts from the book:
Each page has a photo I took that illustrates the text below (in Hebrew and English) that deals with something that I think I understand about spontaneous fine art photography.
Here are some excerpts from the book:
In recent years I go
out every day for a few hours to wander
the streets of Jerusalem, and take photographs of what surprises me, moves me,
shocks me, of things I never saw before, or never understood.
Is this spontaneous
photography? Is this planned photography?
Is what I photographed
a result of an encounter with the
present, or what makes me shoot this or that is some command I stored in my
memory and stepped like a spring in the past, and now, in light of the
"new" it is released?
Every morning when I go
out to shoot I have no idea what I will shoot. Only after I returned home, if I
upload a picture to the Internet - I realize that I had a meeting with the
unknown that is unknowable.
On my official diary I
write meetings that I plan, meetings that may be canceled, but in the folder of
my fine
art photographs I document the intimate meetings I had with the world, none
of them was canceled, of none of them I knew in advance.
I photograph what
surprises me. I think that what I do is going on at the present, but actually I compare what surprises me to
everything I know, which is the past, the acquired knowledge and experience so
far.
Spontanious photography
is based on some thing that the photographer finds unexpectedly without looking
for, or after he gave up the search. The experience of surprise, like the sting
of a scorpion, shocks and shakes every cell in the body. The surprise is
unexpected, some thing that the thought was not ready for.
Spontaneity, the main
topic of this book, is contrary to planning (staged photography).
Spontaneous is close to
the odd, because the odd triggers the attention. Planned is close to the known,
because there's a similarity between the plan and its execution. Known and
odd are also opposites. The odd is not
known, the known is not odd.
Photography is
considered as a tool for self-expression. It seems that the self that is
expressed in staged photography is the thought while the self that is expressed
in the spontaneous photography is the subconscious.
Some photographers
depend on new places, these are nomadic photographers, doomed to travel. But
the natural light is always new and surprising, even if it illuminates familiar
places.
The practice of
photography was in its infancy so precious that only few people of means could
afford it. This social constraints seem to affect the character of photography
as the early years shape a child's personality. Expensive film development and expensive equipment forced photographers
to plan their work carefully and only then to carry it out, namely, shooting was
planned and not spontaneous , and spontaneity
of modern photography is the result of lower production costs.
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