Guy Tal | Photographer, Author
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Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What... Continue Reading →
In my teaching, I wish to promote the concept of expressive photographs—photographs that are not just original or appealing in themselves, but that also communicate some subjective thoughts and feelings form the mind of the photographer.
Disclaimer: my friend, Bruce Heinemann, sent me a copy of his new book, which I feel is well worth recommending. I have absolutely no financial interest in the book. *** Photography, among all of its noble characteristics is perhaps first, and foremost about relationships... between ideas, themes, colors, shapes, textures, metaphors. ~Bruce Heinemann Although neither... Continue Reading →
Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought. ~Bertrand Russell I’m delighted to see various “influencers” promoting the idea of not revealing location information. Recently, even a local tourism board (in Jackson Hole, WY)... Continue Reading →
There are no moments. Moments exist in theory alone. To live, to feel, to experience, to think, is to be in a constant state of becoming. It is the dialectic nature of living, and why experiences cannot be contained in moments any more than a movie can be contained in a single frame.
Searching for a respite from grief, I backpacked through the wilderness and scrambled up the peaks with a near-desperate vigor. Long, hard hikes temporarily soothed my pain and helped me to fall into exhausted sleep at night. At some deep level, the beauty of my surroundings seeped into my subconscious—the lush colors of a meadow dense... Continue Reading →
Introducing his book, Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote, “most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands.” Without intending it, I realized a few years ago that the same has become true of many of my photographs.
I believe that such an implicit contract in photography exists (or should exist) only in some contexts, and that there is no such contract that applies unequivocally to all photographs, and certainly not to all art.
Human faces prompt me to ponder the thoughts and feelings of the persons they belong to, rather than my own.
The natural landscape offers more than just innate metaphors for obsolete emotional associations; it can also be-in a real and measurable sense-therapeutic, and conducive to a more meaningful life.