Letter to a young photographer (actually, a comment via YouTube on the Internet)
Photography is my passion in life. I have always, since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans, taken photographs. This includes taking all my own photos during the years I worked as a reporter and editor at small weekly newspapers in North and South Carolina. I loved it, and loved seeing my photos published.
Today I focus on what interests me most, including landscape and Nature photography, street photography, documentary photography and my own personal art photography. I share my work through Flickr and Instagram. There’s never a day they I don’t take pictures.
I am not a fan of large and fancy digital cameras. I used Nikons for many years but now I am happy with the camera on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I have it with me all the time and the built-in camera keeps getting better and better.
I am also not interested in technical wizardry in cameras or technical details. Photography is very personal to me. The mood, feeling and composition evoked by a subject I photograph is everything. And the most important rule for me is to follow the “Rule of Thirds,” which I fortunately have always done intuitively. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds)
I have studied all the great photography masters. My first major influence was the FSA (Farm Security Administration) documentary photographer, Walker Evans, whose deeply moving Depression era photos from the 1930s Dustbowl days greatly inspired me in 1972. I went on to study many of the other FSA photographers. I will give you a tip here. In thinking about the vast possibilities of photography, there is no greater living master than William Eggleston. He will probably not be around much longer, but his influence is far-reaching among photographers, particularly social realism documentary photographers as I like to consider myself. I encourage you to look into his work. I have almost all of his published art photography books. His work blows my mind! I can honestly say his eye took in everything about the human condition and the constructed and material built environments in which we live out our lives .
Here is a quote I am revisiting that sums up the essence of what I consider photography to be.
Photography is fascinating to me because it’s both descriptive and symbolic at the same time. Descriptive because it shows you something that looks like the world and symbolic because the best photographs not only show you the world but also seem to reach beyond it, to speak of something more. A great photograph touches all sorts of things—other perceptions you’ve had, other things you’ve seen or remembered or felt. It’s that density of meaning that fills some photographs with feeling and makes them profound.
Leo Rubinfien
Some of my recent photos:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/91uaJ115Er
Some useful links and quotes:
William Eggleston
Eggleston Art Foundation
http://egglestonartfoundation.org/
Walker Evans
The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans – Florence Griswold Museum
https://florencegriswoldmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/the-exacting-eye-of-walker-evans/
Selected quotations:
William Eggleston:
“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.”
“You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.”
“I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of.”
Walker Evans
“The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler.”
“Good photography is unpretentious.”
“The eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”