I LOVE WHAT DAVID LYNCH HAS TO SAY ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY

This video of director/writer/photographer David Lynch speaking about photography for the Los Angeles Review of Books really resonated with me (thanks to Digging Time for posting it on Facebook). Here's a quote from Lynch's talk that I particularly loved:

The painting, or the photograph, or the film remains the same, but it's the viewer that is the magic part of the whole process. Every viewer who stands in front of a certain photograph, they're getting a different thing, and I like to think of it as kinda like a circle: goes from the photo to the viewer, back to the photo, a kind of a strange internal dialogue. It's like a beautiful storm comes over us, a thrilling, beautiful storm, a deep love, and a flow of excitement in the brain. We all are seeking this...this feeling, I think, of love.

David Lynch on Photography



In the biggest and most cosmic sense of what I strive to do, or give, or be through photography is precisely that. This may seem to be an over-ambitious goal for someone who often photographs crazy punk musicians in grubby clubs with beer on the floor, but I don't think it's unworthy. The entire value of a moment captured in time is impossible for me as the photographer to gauge -- it will be different for every person that considers any individual image, and it becomes profoundly different over time. What I do know is that within the moving walkway timeline that we all share, to actually be able to look back on something in time is an incredible thing: to view it at your leisure, to examine it, to let the feelings it brings up in you bloom.  If I can at all transmit the excitement, the energy, and the beauty of that fraction of a second, if I can bring that home and then give it to you, then my heart is full. It is true -- it is you that makes the process leave the realm of the technical and move into the emotional, bringing the art alive.

Every time I photograph the music and musicians I love, I feel like the luckiest person in the world. True story.

(Thee Oh Sees, The Crocodile, Seattle WA, 11/29/11)