About Richard Avedon’s Beeman:
“In this one (not shown), he feels the sting of the bees. He feels pain. He accepts suffering – like a Christian martyr. But in the other (shown above), he removes himself in a Buddhist way. He’s oblivious to the stinging. That’s the power of the picture for me. It speaks more directly to my understanding of how to endure, of how to prevail.”
You can see both pictures and a description of the process here.
In my authorship workshops, I love talking about Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden. Their perspectives are so clear that’s it’s hard not to understand what they’re after. But this quote form Avedon is truly my single favorite examples of what it means to take a picture. Worldview is not just the picture you take. Every photographer is going to have some overlap and similarity. Take a look at any issue of The Knot or Brides. Even Grace Ormonde. It doesn’t matter. You’ll find range, but you’ll also find homogeneity. And it’s no coincidence. They are edited that way both by photographers who submit the images and by the editors themselves. Pictures are accepted for specific qualities, so the collections, regardless of which photographer shoots them, have a tendency to look and feel the same.
Worldview is an entire process from shooting to selection and back to shooting again. It’s growth, transformation, and discovery, and the more you put in, the more you get out. Avedon gets in deep. He doesn’t just look at it. It gets down to whether the world is about Christian martyrdom or Buddhist acceptance. And he doesn’t dilute the power of his vision. He shows the images that are him.
Photography is knowing your beliefs about life, about art, about lighting, aesthetics, and every other thing that you can stuff into a picture. It’s going as far as you can, and then pushing it even further. It’s finding out about yourself and becoming better at being you. Seeing you for you. And once you know what you’re about – really about – not just whether a picture is nice, well-taken, or impressive (that’s not you, that’s just comparing you to an accepted standard of quality), but when you know an image truly speaks to your beliefs, you become a force. You get to say this is who I am. This is what I stand for. This is me. And that’s when you get to see that the simple act of being you is an amazing thing.
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