Sam Abell
[Photographer, b. 1945, Sylvania, Ohio, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.]
Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment—this very moment—to stay.
My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.
A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.
Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.
Above all, it’s hard learning to live with vivid mental images of scenes I cared for and failed to photograph. It is the edgy existence within me of these unmade images that is the only assurance that the best photographs are yet to be made.
It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.
In my work, the most elaborate—and essential—accessory is a standard tripod. For spiritual companions I have had the many artists who have relied on nature to help shape their imagination. And their most elaborate equipment was a deep reverence for the world through which they passed. Photographers share something with these artists. We seek only to see and to describe with our own voices, and, though we are seldom heard as soloists, we cannot photograph the world in any other way.
And that desire—the strong desire to take pictures—is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully—and the evidence that other photographers have done so—that keep us taking pictures.
