zoe.

this is an excerpt from a great interview i read by photographer/filmmaker Zoe Leonard. (thanks, Diana Heise.) i enjoyed the interview and if you're a photographic fine artist, i think you'll enjoy her sentiments, too. but her commentary on process really strikes a nice chord for me.

"If there's a scratch on the negative, I leave it there. The roughness in my prints is my way of letting the viewer into my process, the process of photography. I think that photography has been considered a poor relation to fine arts for far too long. The highest compliment you could pay a photographer is to say, "Your work is so painterly". If I wanted to paint, I would paint. My work is about taking pictures, using a camera to observe what's out in the world."

"Photographs play with the idea of absolute truth. When people look at a photograph, they believe it. We believe that it exposes reality. That a portrait can show someone's true character. If you see a picture of something, you believe it really happened that way. Pictures are proof. My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view. I want to draw the viewer into the process of looking so we can look at these things together. I want to show you what I see."

find the rest of the article here.