Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another
New York, 1946, by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
“Now, the reason that photographs work as a form of communication, is that everybody (that can see) understands a bit of what they are saying. They might not be able to verbalize what the image is saying (or how), but they get the message.
Remember Plato’s cave? Think of photographs as the shadows on the wall. Instead of just shadows of things, the photographs are also shadows of ideas.
What the photographer is trying to do regardless of the subject matter, is to capture the most perfect representation of that idea. It could be “hunger”, “love”, “pain”, anything really, but it’s an idea being captured.”
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“A good photograph is one that people want to look at. People want to look at a good photograph, because it speaks to them about an idea in a language that they understand on a deeper level apart from words.”
The cave allegory as applied to photography is very interesting. A great part of the human condition is the human need to communicate. Photography as a language is capable of communicating raw, visceral, base human emotions in their darkness and in their brilliance.
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