Looking at Pictures
Looking at pictures - Laguna Gloria, Austin, 2000
Artists sometimes claim that they work without thought of an audience – that they make
pictures just for themselves. We are not deceived. The only reward worth that much effort
is a response, and if no one pays attention, or if the artist cannot live on hope,
then he or she is lost.
Robert Adams
It is sometimes hard to know what people see in pictures, or if they see anything at all. Tina, my wife, is my closest friend and biggest supporter but even she is unlikely to be able to say what motivated me to take a given photograph or what it means for me now. And that was the stimulus for today’s remodeling of the larger web site of which this blog is part: to make space for words with the images, to offer my current interpration (at the time of writing) of some that I care most about.
Roland Barthes wrote that “Photography is an uncertain art, as would be (were one to attempt to establish such a thing) a science of desirable or detestable bodies.” Meaning (I think?) that you, the spectator, are unlikely to be affected by or interpret the images that I offer in the same way that I am affected by them or understand them. Nevertheless, I hope you will take a look at the new home page and browse around from there: http://www.mikebroadway.com .
* Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 18
