sábado, 23 de janeiro de 2010

Perspectives and points of view


There is this friend of mine. We start together working as TV cameramen, long time ago, and had the same passion for photography. And we shared also some photography jobs, as publicity, stage and newspaper.
But, mainly, we shared the willing for learning and lots of challenges and exercises.
One of them, and I still use it with my students, is “Time and Space”, if I can call it so. We choose a place – a square, a street, a park – we took the same amount of film and we decide for a certain period of time. Let us say two rolls and two hours. And we had to use it all, time and film. Latter, we compared our work, thinking of technical, aesthetical and semiotic issues.
The funny thing is that we end up sharing the same subjective points of view with different objective perspectives! Most of the time I used my Tamron 90mm and he his 24mm Cannon.
And, while he worked with his wide angle, showing strong foregrounds against distant background, me, with my narrow angle, showed the same thing isolating it from the background. While he integrated the subject into the surroundings, I separated it.
But, if the subjects were the same, if the stories told with our pictures were the same or almost the same, what was the main difference between us, besides the obvious visual? The way the viewer integrated himself with what he was seeing. My friend put them directly into the action, I lead them to a more passive and distant view. In his photos the subject reacts to the photographer, in mine they may not even notice me.
With those differences, witch were the best and the worst photos? I can’t say, I guess we were even, depending on the subjects and our moods.
And is also funny to find out that, after all those years, we still have the same general approach, either in photography, as TV cameramen and in life.
We have talked, through the years, about this. And we came up with a justification: the angle of our favourite lens is a reflection of our personality. Facing the same problem, professional, aesthetic, political or philosophic, and aiming the same kind of solution, we take different paths. And, being none of them perfect, they aren’t wrong also. They are just different perspectives to the same objective.

Now, after telling you this personal story, I challenge you!
I challenge you to compare your favourite lens to your approach to life. Or, the other way around, how your personality leads your photographic work.
And, please, you don’t have to come here and tell us your conclusions. I suppose you getting to any will be more than enough.


Texto e imagem: by me

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