Bill Jay
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1940, Maidenhead, England, d. 2009, Samara, Costa Rica.]
Making a photograph is as difficult as finding a particularly frisky cat in a dark room. Making a great photograph is as chancy as trying to catch a frisky cat in a black room in which there is no cat.
I start a lot of photo projects but never seem to…
True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists.
Photoshop makes it easier to do all the things you didn’t need to do before Photoshop.
I was very disappointed not to be at the birth of photography but I am pleased that I was present at its end. (On “the end of photography” that he says has been declared over and over since the early 1970s.)
Evolution in action: First, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ Then, he created two nude models. Now we have photographers.
Style is not like a filter which when placed over the lens will affect the image… When I walk through the forest at night, the track emerges from the darkness by not looking for it. A unique style emerges in photography by ignoring it, concentrating on the subject...
Formal education [in photography] has a lot to answer for. We have legitimized, sanitized, academized the medium until we are left with issues not substance, critical stances not action. We have encouraged the mimicking of already dead images, like 19th century painters who spent years copying Greek statuary.