A Quote by Galen Rowell

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.
Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.
Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for real powers that always originate elsewhere.
In the history of photography, one process has always replaced another. The tumultuous realignment that's going on in the photography now is really just a natural evolution. The irony is that none of the processes that have been replaced have disappeared. More people than ever are practicing every approach to shooting and printing.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.
I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism - real life - the now.
To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.
I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.
There is a lot of social photography being done now to point to the untruth of photography. It's getting very dull now. So, okay photography doesn't tell the truth. So what? Everyone has known this forever.
To speak technically photography is the art of writing with light. But if I want to think about it more philosophically, I can say that photography is the art of writing with time. When you capture an image you capture not only a piece of space, you also capture a piece of time. So you have this piece of specific time in your square or rectangle. In that sense I find that photography has more to do with time than with light.
In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.
Photography's relationship with pornography is as old as photography. That kind of unholy relationship is formed from the very beginning, and there's a reason why: it's thoroughly enjoyable to be that voyeuristic. Voyeurism is a very old modality, and most of the history of photography is in some way related voyeurism.
First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.
Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.
"Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of "going in for photography," you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person - until they try."
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