The Transcendant Power of Images

Ernest Bujok – ink on paper – silkscreen

When I graduated from Williams College, I was fortunate enough to receive a Thomas Watson Foundation Fellowship.

That grant allowed me to spend the next three years traveling around the world photographing, all expenses paid.

Freed from every possible constraint, I was able to follow my own personal passions, and my passions led me to photograph faces.

The first year I traveled overland from London to Kathmandu, across central Asia. The second in the Middle East, and the third I crossed Africa overland, from Tunis to Nairobi.

Wherever I went, I was drawn to faces.

What I began to discover was that the camera was in fact more than a tool for capturing images – though it is certainly that.  It was also an excuse, in a way, to be someplace I was not supposed to be.  Once, in the middle of the Sahara, traveling with the Tourge bedouin, I was able to spend an evening at the Cure Salee, a tribal meeting of the bedouin.  Because I had the camera, I was able to inject myself right into the middle of the event.

No matter where I went in the world I found that the camera was a passport to entry to almost anything, and later,, to anone.

The lens became for me a means of communication, as opposed to capture.

It was a kind of connection between two people – myself and the subject.  A rationalization for being with someone.

The lens provided a kind of highway borne between us, where none had existed before. A connection.

The connection that the camera provides creates a sort of dialogue between two people – the photographer. In a way, it would be almost immaterial if there were not even any film (or digital card). Sometimes I found that the photograph itself was almost an afterthought. If the connection is good, the experience itself is a kind of performance art.

The fact that you can capture it is what makes it all the more powerful.

This is, I think, what make some photography fine art, great art, even powerful art.

Museums are filled with photography that transcends the mere notion of ‘capture’.

In video we have yet to cross the divide. We still use the video camera as a tool to capture what is in front of us.

Now that cameras are small and ubiquitous, perhaps we can begin to push the edge a bit and think of video as an art form, and a means of communication, as well as recording.