“Photography by nature is spiritual, considering it comes from the darkness to show the light.”
Kevin Russo
I love this quote about the spirituality of photography about showing the light in life and it reminds me of one of my favourite Saint Francis quotes:
“A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.”
I have a personal connection to two of these photographers Katthy Cavaliere who was my friend before and after art school and Tracy Moffatt as she is Australian too and represented Australia in the Venice Biennale and she also showed video and I went to that biennale and I saw that exhibit in 2017.
The Moffett installation mentioned earlier was called My Horizon.
“My Horizon can be about one wanting to see beyond where one is. It can mean to have vision. It can mean to project out and exist in the realm of one’s imagination. This is what artists do, this is what I do and this is what saves me.”
Tracey Moffatt
“Australia’s commissioner of the 2017 Venice Biennale was Naomi Milgrom AC, working with Curator Natalie King. Evoking tantalising, open-ended narratives, My Horizon comprises two new series of large-scale photographs, Body Remembers and Passage, and two new video works, Vigil and The White Ghosts Sailed In, which use carefully constructed scenarios while drawing upon inspirations as diverse as television news reports, poetry, Surrealist painting, documentary photography, Hollywood cinema and the artist’s personal memories.”
Naomi Milgrom Foundation
What I like about Moffatts work is it shows an Australian female indigenous vision of Australia and the world.
“Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.”
Wiki
I like Cindy Sherman’s photos a lot as I also do staged photographs myself in different costumes such as Charlie Chaplin, the Dalai Lama and Chewbacca.
“I wish I could treat every
day as Halloween, and
get dressed up and go
out into the world as some
eccentric character.”
Cindy Sherman
“Andreas Gursky (German): Renowned for large-format, high-detail photographs of architecture and landscapes, emphasizing patterns and repetition.”
“Too good to be true: that is the art of the German photographer Andreas Gursky. His monumental pictures of our world – magnificently orchestrated, gorgeous in their super-saturated colours – are so improbably detailed you can view the sea from outer space and somehow see tiny people far below on the shore. Everything is in equal focus, and every photograph holds more than the eye can see. That they are not real is surely obvious at first glance.”
The Guardian
I like the magnitude of Gursky’s work and it shows how small humans are in relation to the built human landscape and nature.
“Wolfgang Tillmans (German): A Turner Prize-winning artist known for a wide-ranging, abstract, and candid style that challenges traditional photography.”
“Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. He started receiving recognition in the 1990s with special interests in documentations of youths, LGBTQ culture, and clubs. Since then, he has expanded his practice to accommodate diaristic photography, commissioned magazine work, and large-scale conceptual series. Tillmans once commented that he wants his pictures to work in all directions. He explained that his photography speaks much about him, but he pays closer attention to details to make them speak for the viewer and their experiences. Tillmans’s range of work is extensive; He could be capturing images of an airplane from a window or creating portraits of the singer Frank Ocean.”
Google Search
Tillmans photos are varied and magnificent and I like the still life’s best as they are placed in an art historical context of landscape painting but instead reflect the nature of the contemporary world.
“Steve McCurry (American): A photojournalist famous for his vibrant colour photography, most notably the “Afghan Girl” portrait for National Geographic.”
I first encountered McCurry’s photography with the Afghan Girl photo which was on the cover of National Geographic magazine in the eighties and it left me spellbound. They say that the eyes are the window to the soul and her eyes are deep and sorrowful.
“Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.”
Andre Bazin
I like this quote by Bazin and I agree photography can strip from our view of the world the spiritual dusts that stops us seeing the world the way it is in all its coexisting different complexities.
In conclusion I love photography as it’s one of the closest creative mediums between art and life. An image captured in a millisecond can last forever or if a manipulated image, then can be bent to the artist’s vision.
Recent photo of me in my apartment by Yannick Soyez with my latest zine: Intuitive Thinking and I quite often use photography in my art multimedia installations. 2026.
