i’m a thief.
i steal other people’s looks & attitudes & i fix them to make them my own. there’s so much to it.
so much of what i’m not.
so much of what i can neither have, nor give.
so much universality, still.
so much of myself, too.
i’m a thief.
i use other people’s brilliance & talent & beauty to have my pictures radiate with something that was never mine in the first place.
i steal their moments of abandonment to the world, the short unconsciousness of their beings, their poses & smiles, their glances, their thoughts sometimes, even.
i draw the line between them and themselves.
i borrow a part of them for the time of a snapshot, the things that weren’t meant to be seen & noticed, the things that should have vanished.
i capture intimacies & identities & secrecies.
i steal everything. & fix it.
forever.
i’m just a life kleptomaniac who doesn’t want to be cured.
yeah, i’m just a thief.
what a failure.
tu peux restituer aux gens les attitudes de leurs propres ?mes alors qu’ils ne les voient jamais. quelle r?ussite !…
hey, t’es la meilleure voleuse que je connaisse, au moins :-/
what artists aren’t thieves? the mere act of human observation is stealing someone’s moment. art is just putting it into a context.
i do the same in my writing as you do in your photography. i can just change the details a little bit, making me both a thief and a liar.
but i don’t care. if it conjures any depth or any pause for thought or a simple, “that’s really nice,” it was worth it.
the originality lies in the context, not the actual material.
–> beleg : dans mes bras :D
–> well, sara, i just erased a lot of things, because the more i wrote about why i didn’t quite agree with you, the more i thought about details and remarks that let me to agree with you.
maybe i feel like a bigger thief because photography is the medium which has the more objective reality within it, and because it takes a lot less time to take a snapshot and steal a look than write about it. at least, that’s what i feel.
now maybe you’d be the kind of thief that watches something to steal, thinks about it, and put the words down, while i’d be a kleptomaniac : i see something that shines, i take a picture without thinking about it and run away…
oh, and i’m a liar too but for different reasons : i make people believe that the look that i bear on things is original and my own.
–> lara, tu vas me tuer mais…merci ! :)
…and i need to think a bit more about all this, but i’m not sure that a simple observation is a robbery : you can look at a golden watch in a shop all you want, it doesn’t mean you’re going to actually steal it, right ?
please note i said the act of HUMAN observation, which is much different than watching a gold watch.
but i get your point. i suppose stealing would entail making that moment yours, taking the qualities or perceived qualities of that person and adapting them to your own uses.
stealing involves making something yours. the good thing about art, though, is that it’s not like stealing someone’s wallet or car. you don’t take anything away from them.
shit, it’s happening to me, now, and my point is turning against me! lol.
so maybe we’re not thieves. maybe we’re simply interpreters. because, most of the time, the person you’re “stealing” from isn’t even aware of what you’re taking.
so maybe we just take their moment and interpret it in our own artistic language. interesting…
oh, yeah, alright, human observation, you’re right.
i tried to do more thinking about it today at the shop (ugh), and i still consider photography to be a bit different from other artistic languages, as you’d say, but the more i try to think about the way to explain that, the more i find examples of what’s common to everything.
(i’d be such a bad lawyer)
but anyway, yes, we wouldn’t make art without interpretation, but isn’t there something more than that ?
i don’t know, i need to think and write about that, probably here sometime this week if i can…