A Quote by Max Pam
[My photography teacher] gave me the Mexican Day Books of Edward Weston and just blew me away with this work. The fact that you could be this fabulous visual artist, with all this milieu of people like Diego Rivera and you could sleep with these gorgeous, amazing women, that you could live that life - that photography could deliver you that life.
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A work can do many things at once, and it doesn't have to be just about the world, it could also be about photography, it could be about perception, it could be an exploration of the medium. It could be a document, it could be a visual poetry, and it could be a formal exploration all at the same time.
I made a decision that to me, photography had to be something that I could feel. I could feel in my stomach. I could not take pictures that were not connected to my own inner life.
I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.
Fashion was very important to me because I could practice my acting skills, I could practice working with the camera, I could work with amazing photographers. It just gave me a different field of work.
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.
How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."
I can appreciate the idea that with e-books more people would publish, the work would be easier to disseminate, and that it could even be interactive. Being a lover of photography, I especially like the idea that you could include lots of pictures - full-color pictures - with your writing. That to me is exciting! We'll all have to stay tuned to see what develops.
I think that if someone told me I could have been a visual artist, I might have been a visual artist instead. And if I'd known I could have done art history, I would have done that. But I just didn't know.
I left film because I felt that photography was my art. It was something I could do on my own, whereas film was so collaborative. I thought as a photographer I could make something that was artistic and that was mine, and I liked that. And it wasn't until I got back into film and I have very small crews and I could do very tiny filmmaking that wasn't 100 people that I still felt that I was making something artistic as a filmmaker. So, you know, I'm an artist, and whether it's photography or film, I want my voice to be there and I think my voice is very strong in this film.
We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.
God gave me photography so that I could pray with my eyes.
Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.
If life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.
I tried to do everything I could to study Walt Disney. I would read every book I could on the company, and then I found out more about him as a person, as an entrepreneur, and it was just fascinating to me that this guy was able to live a great life with his family but also do these amazing things at work.
I don't see perfection as far as a visual image of perfection. "Perfection" to me is, I walk away from a situation and say, "I did everything I could do right there. There was nothing more that I could do." Like, I worked as hard as I possibly could have. That's perfection.
I didn't do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art - anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.
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