15 Great Quotes By Photographer Sean Kernan

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Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Sean Kernan.
“Somehow the pictures that work out just the way I wanted them to are the ones I lose interest in soonest. The expectation has become the limit. And I think that the way to take something beyond your own expectations is to leave what you see unnamed and beyond concept for as long as you can. I want to work as far beyond what I know as I can get, and the gate to that beyond lies exactly between seeing and naming.” – Sean Kernan
“I have to say that what is revealed to me lies beyond any ideas I had for the pictures.” – Sean Kernan
“I think that I began by wanting to see what kind of pictures this intense way of working might produce, and honestly I didn’t have any idea beyond that. There was no planned outcome, none of what I recently heard a composer call “The Fallacy of Intention.” – Sean Kernan
“The benefits of chance are enormous, but you have to watch out for them too. Chance gets me beyond whatever I had in mind when I started to work. It comes into play when I let things happen and then chase alongside them and grasp them on the fly. It’s like two acrobats, one of whom doesn’t know that he’s an acrobat. But the artist is responsible to what chance gives him, and just setting it down without taking it in and manifesting it again in the heuristic process is not enough. Maybe it’s that chance is happening all the damn time, and it’s the artist’s intentional work with it that strains artworks out of the soup.” – Sean Kernan
“I’d love to say something more intelligent about this, but I don’t know that the process had much intelligence in it.” – Sean Kernan
“I’m inclining toward the idea that the working process of art is a lot more thoughtless than I once imagined – thoughtless but not stupid.” – Sean Kernan
The process is in the elimination of conceptions and cleansing the mind, then in claiming the awareness and manifesting it in a work.” – Sean Kernan
“So you want to float in that space of awareness as long as you can, keeping all possibilities alive so they can become clearer, then you pull down one that is BOTH unexpected and makes perfect sense.” – Sean Kernan
“It is the unexpectedness of the image that wakes us up so we really see something, and the rightness of the image that affirms what we have seen in the mind’s eye.” – Sean Kernan
“So if every thing looks right and it still feels wrong, or lacks resonance, or if it refers mainly to other photography and not to seeing, to awareness itself, you should sniff elsewhere.
“The first question I tell students to ask in the first critique of a class is not is the work good, but is it alive ?” – Sean Kernan
“You can see it in a great actors work – look at De Niro, or Streep, or Arkin. They can just stare into the air and you’ll sit and watch them, watch their intensity. And I realized that some of the best photographers I know have that same kind of intensity. It shows in their work. Their intense staring generates its own power, and we respond by staring with them.” – Sean Kernan
“I have a real appreciation these days for work that abrades me into awareness.” – Sean Kernan
Learn more about Sean Kernan here.

View 12 Great Photographs By Sean Kernan here.

Read our Quick Q&A here.

Read our Conversation here.

View video by Sean Kernan here.

View 12 Photographs Celebrated By Sean Kernan here.

Read more Great Quotes By Photographers here.

 

Photographer Richard Benson – In Memoriam

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Lee Friedlander’s “Richard Benson, 1984.”

Photographer Richard Benson died of heart failure June 22, 2017 at the age of 73. The photographic community lost a brilliant mind that advanced print making.
“Mr. Benson, known as Chip, believed in the painterly impact of reproducing the work of photographers like Irving Penn, Lee Friedlander and Helen Levitt on an offset printing press. A photographer himself — as well as a longtime teacher at Yale and for 10 years the dean of its school of art — Mr. Benson was no stranger to the darkroom. But the offset press — and, later, inkjet printers — fueled his fascination with using new mechanical forms to recreate photographic images …”
Read the full article on the NY Times.
Find his book North South East West here.
Find his book The Printed Picture here.
Read our conversation here.
Read quotes by Richard Benson here.
View video with Richard Benson here.

12 Photographs Celebrated By Sean Kernan

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Sean Kernan’s The Secret Books

Sean Kernan makes insightful comments on twelve photographs.
“At this point I most respond to things that stir me to a kind of seeing that I didn’t think I could do. They make me want to try, even though I have no idea where or how to begin. This group contains work from major artists and workshop students, proving that anyone can break through.” – Sean Kernan
Anselm Keifer
Anselm Keifer. I love this artist’s work, and in particular his books, of which this is one. The distressing of the photographic image and its inclusion in a book makes me think it’s a history of the end of the world…that has been left out in the atomic rain.
Arno Minkinnen
Arno Minkinnen. Arno’s “subject” has been his body for so long that he has found the deepest caves of the mind. They are not only what he thinks but of what they make me think. In this case I see some Finnish shamanistic ritual that takes place at the threshold of life/death, with passage going either way.
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus. This seems to sum up all the mystery of her seeing. The more you think and say about this image, the further afield you drift. Just look at it and shut up.
Duane Michals
Duane Michals. So often we look at a photograph. Here we start to read it and realize that we are being drawn in as a player, as a subject of the…picture. And so is anyone else who looks at it. Fantastic!
Irving Penn
Irving Penn. This photo knocked me out when I saw it. It is not documentary. Instead Penn has bridged the world of the highland Quechuan Indians of Peru and the formality of Brozino, the great Rennaisance portraitist.
Larry Clark
Larry Clark. Photographers love to visit other worlds (see Penn, above), but Larry lived in the drug world and he had a camera. Tough, tough pictures. To learn more, read Dennis Johnson’s book, Jesus’ Son.
MichelleElloway
Michelle Elloway. This picture started as a workshop assignment to photograph a place where something had happened. I said nothing about writing down what it was that had happened, but the photographer blew the class away by writing the results of the event, turning the whole thing into a chilling Shirley-Jackson moment. (If you don’t know Shirley Jackson, read The Lottery.
Ralph Gibson
Ralph Gibson. Ralph’s work is sui generis, very simple, graphic and pregnant. This photo isn’t really like that, thanks to that wavering curtain, I think.
Rebecca biddle Mossman
Rebecca Biddle Mossman. I love pictures that get beyond thinking. I am sure that the photographer just started off the situation, then saw something and pushed it, then just let it happen. (That’s my guess.) It’s the best way of working, and it leads to photos that you can’t believe you took.
Saul leiter 1
Saul Leiter. I’m giving him three, because he is new to me and because he has a freedom that I wish I had! The first is just saucy, impudent, sexy and innocent. I look at this woman and I just want to give her a shirt and take her out for coffee. She’s young in the picture, but I’d still love to meet her and say “So, tell me about your life.”
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s better to just suspend in the moment.
Saul Leiter 2
Saul Leiter. The second Leiter is just…ah…like watching a juggler make a perfect catch from completely off center.
Saul Leiter 3
Saul Leiter. The third Leiter brings together three entirely different kind of images and resolves them while somehow leaving them intact.
Learn more about Sean Kernan here.

View 12 Great Photographs By Sean Kernan here.

Read our Quick Q&A here.

Read our Conversation here.

View video by Sean Kernan here.

View more Photographers Celebrate Photography here.

12 Photographs Celebrated By John Paul Caponigro

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Alfred Stieglitz’ extended portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe is a penetratingly honest act of love.

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Christopher Burkett’s makes accurate representation an extension of his spirituality; he celebrates Creation by faithfully transcribing “The Book Of Nature”.

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Paul Caponigro’s “Galaxy Apple” reveals a macrocosm within a microcosm, demonstrating the power of metaphor; ordinary things are seen as extraordinary.

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Eliot Porter’s photography intuited more complex realtionships in nature before the field of chaos science was popularized.

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Pollution or blood? A tense mystery is created by Edward Burtyinsky’s beautiful images of distressed landscapes.

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Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos examines a single subject (the American desert southwest) in many different ways over a long period of time, creating a dense web of interconnections.

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Adam Fuss’ photograms, as much about shadow as light, share a stance similar to many abstract painters who point to the object created more than what it refers, while at the same time highlighting the distortions that lenses can bring to representation. The questions his work raise are generative.

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Walter Chappelle’s Metaflora series creates images with plants, electricity, and photosensitive paper in complete darkness. What else can’t we see? What would we see if we could?

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Jerry Uelsmann bring’s images in the mind’s eye into sharp focus with the most directly representational medium.

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Robert and Shana Parke-Harrison’s post-apocalyptic poems perform acts of care for the natural world despite their odds of success.

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Courageous and honest or perverse and self-indulgent? The complex mix of beauty and taboo, infused with death and sexuality, and guilded with art historical references and fine craft is extremely provocative. It’s honest but is it Truthful? Is it wise?

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Andy Goldsworthy’s photographs are all most of us see of his ephemeral earth works often made in remote locations. So what’s the real art? The performance? The object created? The photographic record? The books that collects those records? All of it?

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Photographers look at and understand photographs differently than the average viewer. Their years of unique personal experience with the medium is special. For me, their insights open new windows into the medium, the world, and myself. I hope they do the same for you.

In this series of posts, each photographer selects 12 if their favorite photographs and provides a short insight into why these images are so moving to them.

I’m kicking off a series of photographer’s celebrating photographs.

View more Photographers Celebrate Photography here.

Stay tuned for upcoming additions.

View 12 Great Photographs By John Paul Caponigro here.

Read more quotes by John Paul Caponigro here.

Read our Quick Q&A here.

Read our Conversation here.

View video by John Paul Caponigro here.