It used to be that photos of yourself which weren't too flattering were
merely artefacts, merely artifacts, I can't decide which. A little
vaguely embarrassing, or maybe slightly endearing given some time, a
little, well, what can you do. These things happen, it's just a bad
photo of you. Nobody's wonderful all the time, a disney princess in
every shot. Maybe with a little less horror and a little more bemusement
a small window opens onto your sense of self esteem. But OK, no
need to get into neuroses. But I think these days you try to hide these
things somewhere they don't see the light of day. God, a bad photo.
Let's get rid of the evidence and pretend that only some distilled
notions of beauty exist in these momentary frames. I find that so awful.
What are you afraid of exactly? What bugs you about so called
imperfection? That you don't look beautiful from any other angle and at
every other time the cameras aren't turned on? That to the people
sitting beside you and whatever they don't know what you look like
except through the clinically desensitised square of a photograph? That
through eyes you could never look through someone is judging your odd
features in some totality of beauty that you could never add up to?
Geez, I just find that awful. It's so sad that the concept of
photography, how we think of that in the general, has come to only so
much. Wondering why some people look fabulous in photographs. It's all
so silly. Examine the picture in your heart first. I remember reading
that somewhere, or maybe I'm paraphrasing. Real truth and beauty is far
above what appears unglamorous. Light doesn't reveal what looks good, it
reveals what we should have known.
"Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one's clarity of mind, one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life."
"Without the participation of intuition, sensibility, and understanding, photography is nothing. All these faculties must be closely harnessed, and it is then that the capture of a rare picture becomes a real physical delight."
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
