Blog Prompt #16-18

“I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.” Duane Michals

I think that it is important for both types of photos to exist: provocative and the ordinary. Ordinary photos are important because they document our history and can be used to look back upon at a later point in time. Provocative photos are important too though because photography is an art and thus should be taken up with a creative approach as well as merely trying to document a moment.

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” Duane Michals
I like this quote, and I somewhat agree. However, I don't think that what you cannot see is MORE important, I think that it is just as equally important. In order to have a basis to let your imagine jump off of, you need to be able to see at least something in the photograph. If you couldn't see anything, you wouldn't have a photograph to begin with.

“Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.” Arnold Newman
I also somewhat agree with this quote. Photography can play tricks on your mind and make you believe that you see something that you really don't because it captures such a small fraction in time. We create our own 'private world' from a photograph because each of our experiences allows us to take away something different from a photo and to interpret the emotions and feelings it conveys differently.