Your Body Decides the Photograph Before You Do - Photographer Tim Carpenter, E119

Matt sits down with photographer, writer, and educator Tim Carpenter, author of 'To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die' and photobooks such as 'Local Objects', 'Little' and 'Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road', for a deep conversation on the philosophy beneath the photographic image. 

In this episode you will learn a way to understand why the form of a photograph, not its subject, is where its meaning and beauty actually live, and how working with a camera can teach you to make peace with a world that will never bend to your wishes.

We explore the 'broken self' and the gap between the real and the ideal, why form is everything that is not in front of the camera, the difference between the depicted and the detected, how the body and the camera move through the world as a single instrument, why beauty in a photograph is a fleeting moment of equilibrium, and how a photographer can build a meaningful body of work and a real audience without chasing scale.

Other things we discussed:

• Why great art resists interpretation, and the ethics of meeting a subject as something singular
• The exposure test that reveals whether you truly care about form
• How Tim moved from being subject-matter driven to understanding structure
• Reading his own emotional distance in the photographs of Local Objects
• The pinned butterfly problem in portrait photography
• What Robert Adams wrote in a two-page handwritten letter
• Why Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes may not help working photographers
• The anti-solipsism machine, and how the camera refuses your projections
• The loss behind Bucks Pond Road and the books that became a loose trilogy
• Why you do not need a big audience to make work that matters

Tim's links:
Website: https://www.timcarpenterphotography.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timcarpenter

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