It looks staged, it looks real.

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One of my friends commented on the last shot – ‘almost a Jeff Wall  composition’.

Composition, yes, I must agree. But not at all the same approach or meaning. It looks similar, yes (I didn’t think about Wall until my friend pointed it out), but it speaks very differently. Wall is best known for staging his elaborate shots and referring art history, and as you probably noticed, my personal work is never staged, it’s all found.

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You might say – so what, it looks almost the same, it’s a photograph at the end right, isn’t it the same then? Well, no, it is not. The meaning in art is not purely based on what you see. It’s the whole process – every decision along the way counts, especially today, when the audience is fully aware of the whole process, when artists share their thinking, sketches and approaches next to their works.

I remember one of the great sculptors of the Renaissance being quoted to say something like ( I’m quoting from memory again): taking someones hand and casting it will produce a lifeless corpse, you need and artist to sculpt a hand that will shine with life. I happen to believe something similar is happening in photography, just the other way around (sounds silly, I know). Especially when you tell your audience what your process was.

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As you probably noticed, I’m not about hunting for those unique moments that happen once in a lifetime (a certain man jumping over a puddle while a poster behind him has a jumping ballerina on it comes to mind). I do not treat photography as a competitive sport, I’m not a visual athlete with a camera.

‘I will not stage my images, because the world is far more interesting than my believes about it’ – a photographer said, and I’m so sorry for not remembering who that was. But he was right.

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