Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/15

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Subject: [Leica] Why I photograph - a valentine
From: "Mark Davison" <DAVISON_M@msn.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 10:44:07 -0800

Yesterday I made a valentine for my wife, using the picture

http://www.leica-gallery.net/markdavison/image-24669.html

and a short poem:

Rooms

There are rooms where the light falls
 and lingers like the memory of a caress.
There are rooms where passion flares,
 is savoured, and not forgotten.
There are rooms where love enters,
 and never leaves, haunting the smallest crevice with sweetness.
Let us live out our lives in these rooms.


It is not an award-winning photograph, suffused as it is with flare, even
with Solms best 35mm lens. My eighth grade English teacher would probably
blanch at the poem. But the two together convey a sentiment much more
strongly than any Hallmark card I could buy.

So for me the question is not, how do I become and award winning artist or
photo-journalist? The question is, how can I use art and technique to make
my own personal communications powerful, honest, true, sometimes near
beautiful? In short, can I use the camera to make my own art, and not be
forever at the mercy of general purpose images shot by someone else.

Sometimes a message is no less important because it has an audience of one.

I think we should stop belittling people who just want to take better
pictures of their family joys and sorrows, for their family. What higher
purpose could a camera, and a democratic art form, really serve?

Happy valentine's day a day late.

Mark Davison


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Replies: Reply from "Ted Bayer" <tedbayer@harbornet.com> (Re: [Leica] Why I photograph - a valentine)