Showing posts with label Preface. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Preface. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Preface

So it was brought to my attention that the "Introduction" I had written is actually a preface. So here it is, again, re-written and drastically shorter.
a.

In the winter of 2008, I thought, “I just want to take pictures,” convinced that there must be a way to relate photographs to architecture, or architecture to photographs. Caught up in the dialogue of what is architecture and what is art, I spent almost an entire year trying to justify why I wanted to take pictures, what it had to do with architecture and what it all meant to me.

I began familiarizing myself with photographers - incredible photographers - like Walker Evans, Harry Callahan, Eugene Atget and Robert Frank. After all, the more photographs we see, the better photographers we become. I read texts by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, John Szarkowski and Stephen Shore, hoping they had the answers I was looking for.

I eventually decided to photograph – to throw myself into the act of taking pictures. I stopped looking for a justification for it, besides my desire to do so. I wandered through Galt, taking pictures when something caught my eye, and, though not structured or pre-meditated, this wander became my format, my modus operandi.

There is a seduction in the opportunity to combine two passions and create something. Synthesizing the original two, the experience inevitably becomes a third passion or, even, an obsession. When I finally decided to photograph, it was through the experience of it, that I located my thesis and its relationship to architecture.