The maturation process on our photography
Analyzing what I do and the maturing process of my photography and my visions allows me to better understand who I am as a photographer and where I am going.
So I wrote in 2013:
Photography, art in general, is close to freedom only when we manage to bring it to our innermost being. The more I photograph the more I know myself. Photography is not a matter of form for me, I am interested in it's content. The content should not necessarily be revelation - or even worse, didacticism. I’m not a photographer from Yosemite Park…I don’t fucking care about the technical celebration. Photography for me is not a matter of tonal range. For me it is instinct, the ability to capture fragments, or being able to move through the images with my own state of mind.
Didactic photography is terribly boring. My photography doesn’t want to be reassuring. I live in a Mexican barrio, why should I photograph sunsets and flowers? I do photograph flowers, but even these are through a dark eye…so that I find les fleurs du mal. My photography is not supposed to look beautiful. I’m not even interested in the composition…I feel indeed that I must improve on this … I want to be dirtier. The image is the thing that matters. The process is not important, but the idea - that is crucial. I smile mockingly when someone talks about originality. What is originality? Yet another portrait is original? A new shot in the street? Everything is reinterpretation. Everything is reproduction in photography. Decoding is the key. Or, if you prefer, the filter. The photographer through his experience and his cultural heritage is that filter. Sure…I am not talking about technique. That’s a concept that I leave to monkeys with a camera, or the ghost of Ansel Adams.
I think Charles Bukowski is more important for me than Henri Cartier-Bresson. There are no rules for the visual inspiration. Even if someone is always trying to create them. There is no reality in photography. There may be realism, but not reality. I can only try to collect portions, fragments of reality. It is through this consciousness that I create images. The image of an image is another image. Rewritten, regenerated, renewed. A new image. A new fragment of reality.
Alex Coghe 2013
I'm not that absolutist anymore. I think this is normal. With age one gets softer (but not too much haha) and I like to put in discussion anything. Today, however, I enjoy the journey in photography much better. Indeed, I must say that precisely in photography, in the act of photographing and therefore dedicating that time to reflection and to myself, I find that serenity that unfortunately no longer inhabits the world.
At one time, the foolish competitiveness that others applied had ended up infecting me too. And believe me, it's one of the worst things anyone can do to photography. Today I no longer even conceive of taking part in a photo contest. I cannot do this to my visual research.
So, today, as I photograph, I really find meaning. And it is beyond any super-imposed logic.
I'm not throwing everything in the trash. Quite the opposite, in fact. Rather it is a different awareness of what I want that pushes me to affirm today that I am focused, photographically, only on myself.
And this forces me not to pursue what is right dictated by others. Rather it's just me in front of the world, with my camera.
Today I would no longer fall into the provocations that they made on me at the time. Photography, my photography, is much more important and I have no more time to waste. There is a lot of work to be done.
