I spent close to twenty years as a photographer, devoting most of my energy to trying to make art photographs. The rest of my time I spent either teaching photography or photographing paintings. With just one set of pictures—taken in the neonatal intensive care ward of a childrens’ hospital—was I successful in loading up a series of photographs with the kind of energy Gelernter describes. Fifteen years later, I have no idea whether the images were art or not. But they certainly met the need that Kafka wrote about for "those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us." The only reason the pictures had such energy was that I had utterly lost interest in photography as art.

Posted by GeeTee at February 16, 2003 08:06 PM | TrackBack 0