Dearest Duygu
I was reading Robert Frank’s The Americans at lunch time today, I don’t know why I never took it out sooner. I’m probably a fool but I am a fool in love with these images Duygu. Their power made me think heavily about what I’m doing. Almost none of these photos are brilliant because of anything to do with composition or image quality. The framing is sloppy often, straight lines are seldom parallel, most of the shots are blurred and all of them are grainy. These photos are a product of pure subject, of what the camera was pointed at.
I’ve always felt it best that photographers learn photography on an automatic camera that will handle exposure and focus. Give them no manual control and leave them to think purely in terms of composition, but looking at these photos I started to think we should all learn on cameras without viewfinders. Force us to think about nothing but what we’re pointing the camera at and whether it matters.
The images are well composed, that’s not what I’m trying to say, I’m just saying that maybe composure should be one of those secondary things learnt, like flash sync or push processing or zone focusing. That it should never be considered the corner stone of our art. Maybe the cornerstone of commercial photography like lighting and make up but not the center of art.
In the introduction Kerouac says that Frank was unobtrusive. He calls him unobtrusive and nice but that was the other thing about this book, these images weren’t unobtrusive, and I know Robert Frank wasn’t nice. There’s nothing unobtrusive about lifting a camera to your eye and these photos had people staring right back, not smiling but angry at being photographed. What’s more aggressive than taking a photograph of someone? Stepping up to them and taking a swing? Frank says he barely spoke to anyone on this trip, the images aren’t hewn out of trust, they’re of someone savagely stealing moments out of people’s lives.
I feel this point particularly acutely Duygu. I can barely make eye contact with human beings and this book made me wonder how much longer I can keep up this detachment from humanity, how much my art will suffer for it, is suffering for it. Whether the world really needs another timid man who pretends he’s taking a light reading when really he wants to photograph the street kids at the end of the alley. I know we can’t all be Robert Capa but maybe I should be risking something more when I’m out there with my camera, maybe it should be more of a risk.
In the library I felt like I was going to die. I feel like I’m going to die often, I won’t deny this. Two or three times a day, more if I can’t sleep. The regularity of this fear does nothing to dampen its affect on me and why should it? I am going to die after all, but the chest pains I had as I left the library didn’t feel like a pounding, but a crushing. As if my heart had taken to contracting itself into a point to push blood to my hands and eyes. My chest pains aren’t a rare occurrence and I know they’re probably the delusions of a hyperchondriac but as I walked home under flat grey thunder clouds it didn’t feel like my heart was pumping, it felt as if it was clenching. Like a fist.
Okur mektubu. Gene tartışma moderatörü gibi “En güzeli bir denge tutturmak” falan diyebildim… Nerde isyan, nerede kavga. Doğru söylüyor ama Riaz. Ben n’apayım. Manyak ekipmanlarıyla aynı hissiz fotoyu, aynı sıkıcı arkadaşları, aynı arkadaşının arkadaşı güzel kızları 100 defa, 1000 defa çekenler. Ne stil, ne dirayet, bu yalnızca korku.
