"You are not going to be in the room when people look at your pictures. Your picture has to speak for itself"Joe McNally
That's a quote from Joe McNally's book 'The Moment It Clicks'. I have just found that one out myself, but it took reading those words in a book for me to realize that realization. I had my first 'exhibition' few weeks ago. Lots of people came to see my work as part of the Hackney Wicked festival few weeks ago. It was a brilliant time - I never realised how self-obsessed I had become since I started calling myself a photographer. That's the main thing I noticed when frolicking amongst the guests in our improvised gallery.
The other - more puzzling - thing for me was that people were generally interested in different pictures than I was ready to tell a story about. It's McNally's little piece of wisdom that made everything cristal clear for me. It is not the pictures that have a strong memory for me that are interesting to others, it is the pictures that bring interesting memories to other people that are the most fascinating.
I am not sure how this 'heureka moment' will affect my shooting, but it is surely going to influence the way I think about picking the pictures that are going to be shown to others from pictures that mean a lot to me.
