Tile worker in South India

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

With the camera you interpret reality.  Photography is not truth.  The photographer interprets reality and, above all, constructs his own reality according to his own awareness or his own emotions.  Sometimes it’s complicated because it’s a kind of schizophrenic phenomenon.  Without the camera, you see the world in one way, with the camera, in another.  Through the window, you’re composing, and even dreaming about, this reality as if, through the camera, you were synthesizing what you are with what you’ve learned of a certain place.  Then you make your own image, your own interpretation.  The same thing happens to a writer as to a photographer.  It’s impossible to capture the truth of life.

Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With:  Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs

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