|
|
I believe that, among the creative arts,
photography is the least about creating, the most about noticing.
There are new styles of photography that are more about creating a scene, growing out of the advertising field. But candid, journalistic, and art photography are mostly the result of an alert observer with a mastery of technique, recording what he notices without altering it. This describes the work of most of the great photographers I have admired who work in very different fields: the natural landscape (Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Minor White), the urban landscape (Robert Doisneau, Andre Kertesz, Charles Sheeler, Bill Owens, Lee Friedlander), and the social landscape (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Wright Morris, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, W. Eugene Smith, David Douglas Duncan). They were great observers.
We want to thank them for bringing this, whatever it is, to our attention. "Look at this," they said, and we did. We might not have noticed it otherwise. A tree against the ocean; a sunset; a soldier looking tired; a human being not trying to sell us something, but with honest eyes.
The idea that photography is noticing was articulated by John Szarkowski in his years as curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and laid out most fully in his book of 1973, Looking at Photographs. But it was what I had been doing from 1947 on, when I spent my paper route earnings on a small Speed Graphic camera. The idea of presenting what I noticed in a way that would make others notice was for me the driving idea. I still like, and print, some of what I shot then.
In the arc of my life that urge led me into writing, filmmaking, and finally back to photography in my later years. It is unlikely that a person will put a film on the wall or sit down to study it in bits and pieces as time and mood allow. But photographic prints and books of my photographs can be presented that way, and those are what I make now, with work I did in mid-century, in the last quarter of the century, and in the new century. When we see the story in a photograph, it is our art -- we have to write the story. The photograph is just evidence.
This site contains photographs selected from several of Roger Hagan's photo books, in the form of slide shows. If the words "Image Missing" appear, wait a bit while the slide show loads in.
|
|
|