A Quote by Joel Sternfeld
With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: 'What do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?'
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.
I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.
No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they're good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you'd want to talk to about a book. They hate it by that point; they've already moved on to a new lover. Besides, the author never knows what the book is about anyway.
I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that's about all. And I've traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn't know very much about it, really.
Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.
The people who know me do not ask me about the next book or how it's going. They ask, 'Jason, are you sleeping?' because they know my brain will not shut down.
A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can't fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together - and of course no one can know everything about a topic.
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
I don't come from a film background. I haven't learned anything about films or film-making. But I have a thirst to know everything about my profession. I want to learn about cinematography, about editing, about music recordings, about post-production. So when people in the know talk, I willingly listen.
Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background.
In the United States, they always talk about subtitles, about chapters in a book without taking the main title of the book. They talk about a subtitle in a chapter and if you ask them about the headline, the main title, they say they do not know.
Really, the greatest compliments about a book [One Thousand Gifts] are never about the book, or the author of the book, but about the reader and God and how the pages helped them connect at a deeper level.
My work never directly addresses the literal subject matter of the photograph, but attempts to ask questions about vision itself.
I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it... I understand the philosophical background behind it, but I don't know a lot about it, and I don't think others know a lot about it.
If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?
Related Authors
Amanda de Cadenet Quotes
English
Photographer
Annie Leibovitz Quotes
American
Photographer
Ansel Adams Quotes
American
Photographer
David Bailey Quotes
English
Photographer
David LaChapelle Quotes
American
Photographer
Elliott Erwitt Quotes
French
Photographer
Garry Winogrand Quotes
American
Photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
French
Photographer
Jay Maisel Quotes
American
Photographer
Lynsey Addario Quotes
American
Photographer
Martin Parr Quotes
British
Photographer
Mary Ellen Mark Quotes
American
Photographer
Nan Goldin Quotes
American
Photographer
Robert Adams Quotes
American
Photographer
Sally Mann Quotes
American
Photographer
Sam Abell Quotes
American
Photographer