Taking Pictures or Making Pictures

Last Saturday I was fortunate enough to have been invited for a special event at the Vancouver Art Gallery by my friend Suzanne McMurray. A delicious breakfast was followed by a private guided tour of the Jeff Wall's exhibition.
Even if photography is one of my passions and I have seen Wall's work around the world several times it was interesting to hear more about his art.
The point made by the guide that mostly appealed to me was that in photography we can "take pictures" or "make pictures".
That alone made me think about my own photography.
Obviously my favorite master, Henry Cartier-Bresson, and his theory of the decisive moment (happening when, he said, in a matter of a second the brain, the eye, the heart meet and you then press the shutter) was always followed religiously by me, of course with varying results but been there at the right moment, with the perfect light, allowed me to take a few pictures I consider fairly good.

This one in particular was taken at 1:00 AM in Paris last December. Outside the restaurant were three Camargue horses waiting patiently for the owners while they were having dinner inside. Since my friend Linda Bakk and I were staying in the Marais area, our apartment only three minutes away, we ran home, got our cameras and spent one more hour taking pictures of people walking by and suddenly being aware of the horses.

This was definitely a picture taken.

A picture of that night can be seen on my website Tent London Home Decor under Photography. Those two lovers definitely were not aware of the horses...
The "Vancouver School" of photo-conceptual artists, and mostly Jeff Wall, instead, (and I apologize if my name is in the same context of these Masters, but I needed to explain the point) make pictures, sometimes spending months in constructing the scene, staging any details, creating pictorial art. Wall never intended to be a photojournalist or to document the world, but certainly, as our guide pointed to us he frequently uses "local" to imply "global". His pictures are frequently "made" in BC but they represent the world.

A wonderful exhibition, not large in scale but huge in itself.

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Write by: A-Efendy - Monday, November 3, 2008