“People, for many years, going all the way back to my deceased parents, have often asked and questioned me why I spent so much time studying theology, if I always had the intention of being a photographer. What is the connection, what is the purpose?”

[...]

“My photographs may be my answers, responses, or questions to these questions. Going just to study photography would not provide the right questions. I needed much more.”

— Rodney Smith

Reconsidering Winogrand:

Winogrand’s is the work of a serious artist (though he’d cleanly deny it) dedicated to seeing his project through to completion, even if, in his own case, it wasn’t exactly clear what the project was, or how it might end. Hard work would figure it out. Hard work would leave behind the four foot high piles of prints, the hundreds of thousands of negatives.

Winogrand’s alertness, easily misread as impatience or distraction, was most likely a state of hyper awareness, in which any small flash of visual stimuli might lead to something both wonderful and surprising, and you better be ready to capture it so Let’s Do This. And yet, while Winogrand emerged from the darkroom with photographs that delineate the attentions of a man clearly focused on incongruities writ large; hypocrisies of a nation; the impossibilities of connection; illuminating the surface tension between us all that keeps us apart; it’s easy to imagine him saying, “yeah, but it’s just a picture of a guy on the street.”

Winogrand’s omnivorousness for the image is what drove his greatest successes, like the couple with the chimps. Which is not to say that anyone with eagerness and the right equipment will become a great photographer. But I think Winogrand’s spirit lies less with the academics, and more with the kid who just got his older brother’s hand-me-down Canon Rebel and is about to stumble across a copy of The Animals in the school library during study hall.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

— Martin Luther King, Jr. (via)