Through a Photographer’s Lens: Shin Terada Speaks on Motif – By Shin Terada

Most of the photographs that flood the urban visual imagination are simply beautiful things in focus.

Through a Photographer’s Lens: Shin Terada Speaks on Motif

By Shin Terada

 

 

 

 

Most of the photographs that flood the urban visual imagination are simply beautiful things in focus. These are commonplace photographs, taken by the amateur and lacking in internal motif. The camera takes the picture automatically by pressing the shutter. Anybody can take a picture easily and capture the subject that is in front of the camera lens on the film. The whim of the amateur photo, then, fails to make an impression the people’s heart; the photograph does not express profundity.

When I photograph I want my eyes to breath in synchrony with the image. In photographing a flower, I feel the breathing of life of the flower and I take an instant brightness of its life. In other words, I seek to capture the ï¾’poetryﾓ of the motif in the instant of its appearance. An artistic work is born only after I connect with this motif directly, utilizing the barrier of the camera’s lens. The quality of the photograph depends on the photographerﾕs skilled eyes ﾑ the photographer must have an acute sense of the width, size, area and depth which the motif embodies and must pursue its worth.

In respect to paintings, the painterﾕs subjective composition and idea will become a motif of his work. However we (photographers) cannot make a photograph subjective in this way, and must in fact have our subject present before the lens. Thus I show my impression mechanistically and technically with the image I capture. (High-class cameras with expensive lenses and excellent film do not necessarily make a good photograph. Good photographs are not in the camera-mechanism but in the camera-user.)