Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.
Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past. Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present.
Every time we revise our history, we also revise the mythology of our history.
A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.
It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.