The photographer will tell you there's two moments in a photographic career.
The first time somebody shows you how to make a print and you see an image appear on a piece of paper.
The second is when that image appears and it's exactly the way you wanted it to be.
That moment is exactly what you hoped it would be.
The darkroom is quite a sensual place, it's quite tactile.
You need to be able to physically manipulate the paper, you need to be able to pick the paper up,
touch it just the right amount.
So you're getting this balance of a physical, technical aspect at the same time as you're watching for a moment.
It's an evolutionary process.
I find the movement and clicking of a mouse comes nowhere near that.
David Healthgott is the pianist who was featured in the movie Shine.
He's very intense, he's very, very fast moving, who through the pressures of the whole business had a very severe mental collapse.
And to photograph him was a bit of a challenge, I photographed him at the Sydney Conservatorium once.
And he's so energetic and so driven, you're basically trying to track the guy, you're chasing him as he's moving around.
And he just went through all these different phases.
There was a moment where he stopped, and everything came together in that particular moment.
This moment that he stopped looked calm, relaxed, thoughtful, and I captured it.
That is the power of photography, that little moment that you can pull out.
You can change the story that you want to tell, the story that you want the viewer to take away with them,
by how you manipulate the different densities across the photograph, what you lighten, what you darken.
It builds slowly, and you can start to see what's important that needs to be brought forward,
and what's less important that needs to perhaps be cropped out.
All photographers censor, and they censor with their finger, they just will choose perhaps not to take a photograph.
You choose one moment over another, why do you do that?
Is one more true than another, or is one less true?
It's always a moot point, but there's no truth in photography, there's just interpretation.
It's always a moot point.
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