Some thoughts...

Very quickly as I should be writing a different blog right now;  I wanted to mention something in relation to the post about Asylum of the Birds.  In it I discussed Roger Ballen's capacity for using photography and other elements to create a piece of theatre which ultimately revealed something of his inner world, a great deal of it in fact.  I think it's important for me to acknowledge that it is just as possible to express some of one's inner world without the mis-en-scene.  I guess the difference with Ballen is that he is embracing some of the less celebrated aspects of ourselves; the dirty, gritty, grubby, frightening parts of who we are, the bits we try to deny.

However, a beautiful photograph of the Taj Mahal, an example Ballen uses, may just be that but the way in which it is photographed by someone who has connected their photographic practise to their inner world will undoubtedly reveal something of himself/herself.  Everything we humans do is an expression of who we are and perhaps what we are going through at the time and so it is impossible not to reveal something about yourself in your photographs.  Our inner world seems to imprint itself on our external world even if we're not practising some form of artistic endeavour in moments of peculiar synchronicity.  (Perhaps that just depends on how you view the world.)

What makes interesting photographs however, I think, is when photographers have the ability and desire to reveal a great deal about who they are by the way they choose to photograph something, and then choose to show it to the world.  Bill Dane in the days before the internet made postcards of his work and sent them to people, democratising his art.  Vivian Maier hid her work away and showed no one at all.

The thing that is so great about using photography to express yourself, and Ballen, talks about this in his interview (which I discuss in the my previous post) is that you might take the photograph and only when you look at it later, several days or months, maybe years, after you took it, do you see or understand something about yourself.  It's a voyage of self discovery and that's a wonderful thing to embark on.