“The actors in the events-that-become-objects that are my photographic works are the manipoulable variables of photogrpahic image-making.
That cameras are mirrors with memories is the first important understanding. That “subjects” are transformed to become photographs is the second. The documentary nature of photography is a precious thing. In most cases when we look at a photograph in a newspaper or magazine, we go straight to its subject. I do, too, but to continue the depth of what has been called “art” with photography requires not nobler subjects but a making-available to the spectator of the equally amazing transformations through which the subject goes to become the photograph.
The transformation form three dimensions to two is the most obvious one, but its obviousness apparently make it disappear from utilization in most photographic art but my own. The three-dimensional to two- dimensional transformation in photographs measn this: jsut as in representational painting, forms that were in three-dimensional life separate mand hierarchical (i.e., a human being is more important than a chair). are now equal. Theyx may maintain their moral hierarchy in our reading of a photograph of the 3D world but, in fact, as an incredibly thin distribution of chemicals, they are now all on the same physical plane, a physical object, the support of the image, usually paper or plastic.
As has ever been the case in the best painting, a shape - for example, the demarcated area between a body and a bent arm - is as important in the new planar world as is the representation of the arm itself.
I am trying to continue the soloist aspect of painting. I have added the camera and its products to the traditional tools of the painter/sculptor. My photographic works are an art of the studio, not of la vie quotidienne.”
Michael Snow “Notes on the Whys and Hows of my Photographic Works”, in Michael Snow, Panoramique. Photographic Works and Films 1962-1999, exhib. cat., Brussels-Paris-Geneva, 1999/2000.
