That’s true. I feel very strongly that most photographers, in fact most people’s lives are defined by other people. Very few of us really take our lives in our own hands and redefine them. I had to unlearn the first twenty years of my life. In fact, by the time someone’s twenty years old, all they know about life is what they’ve been told about themselves. Then comes the difficult task of eliminating and finding out what is appropriate for them and not their parents. In a similar vein, most photographers are defined by the medium. They take pictures as seen through the eyes of say Robert Frank or Diane Arbus or…but they’ve never really redefined the medium in terms of their own needs. There are many, many truths. Woman’s truth is not man’s truth, black truth is not white truth, gay truth is not straight truth. Not the Pope’s or anyone else’s. But the culture doesn’t define us as people who ask these questions. -Duane Michals
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 02:32:30 +0000