Tuesday, June 2, 2009

fred herzog: facts do not convey the truth


"Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion. That which I can find is better than that which you can make. That which we find, the work and the use of the people out there, it’s natural, that’s what ordinary people do, that interests me."

"I take pride in saying these are all how we looked, not how we wanted to look, or staged. You cannot stage pictures. That is something I have many many times defended. People say ‘Well you can stage that.’ I say ‘No you cannot, and I can prove it to you.’ Many times over I’ve taken a second shot after [some] kids have seen me, and nothing. It’s a different picture."





"Coca-Cola signs, see, nobody photographed Coca-Cola signs. I did. I actually photographed them to show how the city looks bad without them. And they took those down, of course. They have become collectors items."

"I’m not surprised, because they are beautiful. Embossed on metal, they are beautiful. I wish I had some of them, but I never stole them. Crazy stuff. If you had this Santa Claus with a Pepsi sign now, it would be worth $500. I ate a meal for 25 cents at the same shop. If I had asked for that they would have said come back in a week and you can have both of them."



this guy has a lot in common w/eggleston, one of my favorite photographers that i wrote about a while back. the super saturated colors & the jumbled content framed w/apparent arbitrariness are present in both their work. herzog is a city guy, while eggleston seems more rural. in the documentary on eggleston, eggleston says nearly the same thing herzog says about taking a "second picture," that it changes everything. eggleston put it in terms of "needing to move on" from one shot to the next shot & that repetition is precisely that & useless in terms of taking pictures. the idea of the shot existing as a pure moment of singularity, of it as an action that cannot be repeated, seems to be at the heart of the two artist's method.

"The photograph isn't what was photographed. It's something else. It's a new fact." Gary Winogrand

"Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination." Werner Herzog


"A truth is what, in a situation, knowledge cannot see, what its language cannot utter: a truth is a puncturing of such knowledge. As a result, it can have no truck with meaning either: a truth, Badiou claims, is that which doesn't make sense in a situation, `a hole in meaning'; it cannot be the object of a hermeneutic procedure."
jean-jacques lecercle

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