Eugene Richards - The Compassionate Eye (via damonwebster)
“… The angle, the actual visual elements of the style, the wide lenses, were probably, maybe influenced by film. I grew up in a world of movies as a kind of isolate [sic] child, I immersed myself in films, and the films that come to mind, you know I remembered them perhaps … seeing in later life, Citizen Kane, you know that great sense of depth and motion, being in love with black and white movies moved me. As a matter of fact, the colour just went out of my tv, back to black and white, and it doesn’t look so bad.
With the wide angle lens it does give you a kind of complexity, discordance, where everything isn’t totally stable, and that’s the way I feel about the world, and my place in it. I’m a little afraid of the iconic image where everything is settled and final. Because I don’t think that the way the world I live in is, and there’s the things that come before and the things that come after, but the pictures I feel are transitory moments, they are not the final moment. I think that’s affected my, so called, style. That they are a little bit fractured, a little bit incomplete.
…
I always feel the best thing that you could do is don’t listen to anyone. Find out the few mentors where you look at their work, and it kills you. I remember seeing Robert Frank for the first time, and his work just killed me. I remember seeing some of Gene Smith, the Minamata, at a really early age, and I said ‘God! How do they do this? Why do they do this?’ I remember seeing Minor White’s nudes, it emotionally unsettled me and so I went on my own way and there were people who would tell me to do things differently, but I went on my way, found my own way, and I’m still trying and that’s what I mean. It sounds presumptuous to say don’t listen to people, you listen to people, get their critique, but then you have to find out who you are and once you find out who you are, you stay with it.”
Posted 2 years ago
