Lee Barry's List: Photography

• One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.
• When I use an 8-by-10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It’s very liberating.
• With exposures that may take as long as an hour, you really don’t know what the end result will be.
• When you shoot digital, the images are quick and you spend more time looking at the back of your camera than you do seeing.

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• There is a civil contract implied by photographs. An Israeli writer, Ariella Azoulay, published a book making that point.
• We, viewing the pictures, are complicit. As consumers of images we bear witness through them. Or we’re voyeurs. In either case we complete a transaction that we instigated, in that a photograph is made hoping someone will look at it. It’s a message tossed into the ocean of time, and how we read that message, whether indifferently or with compassion, can have moral dimensions.

  • Diane Arbus was another photographer that allowed us to politely gawk at people.
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• Each has a flip-out, swiveling screen on the back. That feature permits you to shoot at high, low and side angles, not to mention allowing self-portraits. (Nikon’s screen flips downward below the camera, rather than off to the side — an arguably better design, since it keeps your view in line with the lens.) But a flip-out screen also gets the big black camera away from your face, thereby getting more natural, relaxed expressions from your subjects, especially young ones.

  • I loved this feature in my old Canon