By way of illustration he cites the experience of walking down a street in Paris. "There was a famous bakery, Poilâne, with just a tiny doorway, and as you're walking along smelling the petroleum-laden air of the street, you walk past the doorway and you pass through a brief zone of sugar and butter on the air, and you immediately want to go in there. You take two more steps and you're out of the sugar-butter atmosphere, but in the moment I passed through it I was hungry for it, and I imagined and fantasized and wanted it! And then a step later it was gone. I remember thinking: That's photography! You are in a zone for a split second, you recognize photographic moment in the place where you are. Bang! A picture! It's as instantaneous and subtle as that. Something wakes me up! Suddenly I'm alert, and I can see everything happening around me on the street. And instantly try to put a frame around it.
And so I thought that that fragility of experience, that evanescence, is at the heart of the photographic moment. And color photography satisfies the generosity of that moment, and black and white reduces that to a kind of figuration; it's a graphic reduction. And so I had to ask myself: Do I want to work in this reductive method, or do I want the full expressiveness of the world I walk through and that I perceive and read with my entire body and all my senses? And I knew that color offered me that range, so I felt that I had to stand up for it. I made these comparison pictures to make an argument for accepting color."
- Joel Meyerowitz & Robert Shore, Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color, London, 2023, p.55
See also:Blog: Cindy Sherman meets Cate Blanchett, 8 May 2022
Blog: Cindy Sherman: chameleon, comedian, 15 January 2017
Blog: Ans Westra: Wellington 1976, 30 June 2013
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