There is a moment when I press the shutter release that I feel
a surge of joy. That's the word—joy. It doesn't happen
often, but when it does I know that I have made a photograph. It
is that pursuit of joy that drives me to make photographs.
Henri Cartier–Bresson wrote, “of all the means of expression,
photography is the only one that fixed forever that precise and transitory
instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing,
and when they have vanished, there are no contrivances on earth that can
make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.”
It is that “precise and transitory instant” that fuels the passion
of photography that has been within me since I was young. It's a rush of
joy that may cause others to weep and react, or cause some to know themselves
or another in a new way, or cause some cloth on a human body (or the human
body itself) to become living and desirable.
I also approach
photography with a thirst to have the photograph do something. Perhaps
it is because my New England roots love the practical, but if a photograph
does not do something, then it means I missed the moment. A photograph should
evoke a reaction and it doesn't really matter what kind—a reaction
that means the image came alive in the viewer and spoke.
Not very
lofty thoughts, but then my first hero & mentor was W. Eugene Smith. He
thought himself very lofty, but the only words he said to me that I can quote
with assurance are, “Hey, George, is there any scotch left in that bottle?”
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© George F. Weld II, 2000-2008