What is a printed photograph without words?
How much context is given to each photo? How so few words can go so far.
Title. Location. Date.
Person. Occupation. Date.
With only the words that linger near a photograph, can you imagine what it looks like?
By focusing on the language on the page, do you want to see the photograph even more? How today if things aren’t made easy for us, we live like The Fox and the Grapes.
How the Internet doesn’t give you access to photos which are available at your public library. How the Internet rarely presents photographs in white space.
The beautiful entropy of pages. Inks mixing. Oil from people’s fingertips. Bits of food. Splashes of coffee. Wrinkles. Scratches. Wearing corners. All of these things telling their own stories. The marks of time and people before you.
How even if you know the photograph that’s referenced, you still want to see it again. You see new things every time.
How turning the page in a photo book can give you that unique moment of suspense and complete surprise. But you have to physically turn the pages. There are no digital tags that let you automatically jump to specific images. There is a deliberate order and pace to a book.
This idea of “no pictures allowed”. What you are and aren’t allowed to take pictures of. That somehow taking a picture of a picture is more valuable or dangerous to the work than writing or talking about it.
The acquisition or appropriation of people’s names as some sort of self validation.
The value of printed photography and words.
The value of print.
How many people have looked this photo? Hidden from the Internet, there are so many secrets in large photo books on public library shelves.
How many people have been to this page before? The number of marks, creases, and stains on the page are telling.
How we want everything right now. How you can’t see certain photos online. You have to have the book. Or you have to walk your ass to the library to see things that aren’t within a Google search.
Photographing places that belong to everyone—not some exclusive private club. Similar to how there’s nothing private about taking out a public library book.
How there are no bad parts to a photo sometimes.How the caption and area around it create a new photo—sometimes with eerily similar tones and feelings.
How personal and courageous photographers are. An inspiration for writers.
How there is freedom of words but not photos. I can use a person’s name as much as I want but am not supposed to show their photos.
How there are references in the title to things we don’t know. Just like we’d see a picture and not get all the references in it. Maybe we’re not ready to see the photo. Maybe we don’t deserve to see it? You don’t even deserve to look at the photo because “Man, you don’t even know.”
How many photographer’s subjects parallel the relationships we have in our own lives. Pictures of mothers, fathers, our bedrooms, the places that we grew up, the places within 100 meters of our home. How we are and aren’t all that different.