Shooting Free-verse
By Gary Joseph Cohen
1 July 2008
I have been taking a more immediate approach to photography in the past few years, eschewing the layering of multiple conceptual veneers for a direct engagement with place, and the people who define (and are defined by) place. This stripped down strategy essentially allows me to favor spontaneity, abandon my sense of inflated personal space, and adopt intimacy as a kind of orthodoxy. This practice is further activated by the fact that I rarely encounter the subject through the viewfinder, preferring to think of the camera as an extension of my hand rather than eye. In this way, my writing process innervates my photographic process in Whitmanesque terms, saturating the images with an exuberant free-verse quality. It is as if the hand was an eye after all, and the process of photographing people, strangers no less, involved something closer to an embrace rather than a violent capture.
More Photo Essays
More stories by Gary Joseph Cohen
