I’m at a point in my photographic journey where I want to replace my Fujinon lenses- autofocus, recognized high optical quality- with cheap Chinese manual lenses because I struggle with photography’s slavish relationship to “the real world”.
I want distortion, blur, sloppy pools of black and white. I want out from under the drive to “nail the focus” and “perfect exposure” because these qualities are measures of a photograph’s accuracy at re-rendering “the real world”.
I want to NOT direct the viewer’s attention to “the subject” of a photograph. I want the photograph to be its own “subject”. And I definitely do NOT want the picture to “tell a story” or capture a “decisive moment” because, again, these notions point away from the photograph to something supposedly in “the real world”.
I’ve recently started rewatching Wong Kar-wai and Edward Yang, and there is something Yang Yang, the little photographer in Yi Yi, says about his pictures of the backs of people’s heads: “I can only see what’s in front, not what’s behind. So I can only know half the truth, right?” Like a realist manifesto, that little quip.
Rant out.
Smoke and Mirrors 