A Quote by bell hooks
For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
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My childhood was never great. We moved from place to place a lot. There were times when we had no definite place to stay. So, a basic level of security was not always there. Therefore, when you finally make it out, and you become who I am, you're humbled by the memories of those situations.
I was attracted to photography because it was technical, full of gadgets, and I was obsessed with science. But at some point around fifteen or sixteen, I had a sense that photography could provide a bridge from the world of science to the world of art, or image. Photography was a means of crossing into a new place I didn't know.
I came up in photography, and Dust Bowl-era photography is a lot of the reason that I got behind the camera in the first place.
Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.
I mean it's always good to document your history. 'Cos for some strange reason black history has a tendency of getting lost. So I think it's beautiful to have the ability to document it.
I love a place packed with history.
Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.
You keep plugging away--that's the way social change takes place. That's the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.
Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
I love L.A. It was an awesome place to spend my 20s, full of creative people, but I never wanted to stay there. It wasn't necessarily Texas that I wanted to move to; I just knew I wanted to live in the country somewhere. My wife and I found this place in Texas that we really liked, so we packed up our stuff and moved.
When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place [if we anticipate and look for it, rather than wallow in our 'supposed loss'. It can be helpful to think of the loss of that blessing as simply necessary to make way for another different blessing].
Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire.
Photography, precisely because it can only be produced in the present and because it is based on what exists objectively before the camera, takes its place as the most satisfactory medium for registering objective life in all its aspects, and from this comes its documental value. If to this is added sensibility and understanding and, above all, a clear orientation as to the place it should have in the field of historical development, I believe that the result is something worthy of a place in social production, to which we should all contribute.
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older.
Everything necessarily is or is not, and will be or will not be; but one cannot divide and say that one or the other is necessary.I mean, for example: it is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, or for one not to take place--though it is necessary for one to take place or not to take place.
We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off.
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