Quoted By:
>Who do you think is the intended audience for your photos? Is it generally photographers? Or do you think they can appeal equally to a general layman audience? What does your family (both immediate and extended) think of your photography? Do they "get" it?
I went to a liberal arts college where I spent too many Friday and Saturday nights reading books and writing papers in the stacks of the library. The classes were usually small and maybe a dozen or so of us students would sit around a table delving into novels by Proust or Dostoevsky, really getting into the nihilism of Russian literature or whichever subject. There's no way I would have been able to do the work I've done in relative isolation for so long without having been fortified by this experience. So maybe my work is mostly for people who have done a careful reading of at least a few books and who might still be able to fathom the magnificence of literature (I include photo and film as literary forms). Photographers who know the medium well might get something out of my books that others who lack a background in photo history wouldn't, but for me, anyone sensitive and smart will do. I would be happy for my work to be known beyond the photo book ghetto. My family has been able to get my work well enough.
Photography is at its most basic a method for sharing. You stand in front of something, take a picture, and then someone else in a different place and a different time might be touched by it - so I think photography is just about always for some kind of audience, even if it's an imagined audience.