Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Encounters

'What is a camera? "why do people take photographs?" I am always brought back to this very basic question when I take photographs or think about photography.'
- Daido Moriyama








As part of 'A Day in the Light' workshop for now what?, we were talking about how to photograph a place that has been photographed and re-photographed countless times by tourists...Mohammedreza Mirzaei's 'The Encounters 2007-08' came to mind.
Here, he addresses this by photographing the tourists who are in turn photographing the place...








"What emerges is the idea that people seem locked into their insatiable craving to take pictures while on holiday more so than the actual experience of the spectacle itself."
-Tim Clark, Editor and director of 1000 words








"Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel."
- Susan Sontag -
On Photography (1977):