Get to know photographer Adam Fuss better with these 3 videos.
Read my conversation with Adam Fuss here.
View 12 Great Photographs By Adam Fuss here.
Read 10 Great Quotes By Photographer Adam Fuss here.
View more in the Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Adam Fuss.
“I was attracted to photography because it was technical, full of gadgets, and I was obsessed with science. But at some point around fifteen or sixteen, I had a sense that photography could provide a bridge from the world of science to the world of art, or image. Photography was a means of crossing into a new place I didn’t know.” – Adam Fuss
“Photography is compellingly attractive because it is recording light. But it’s not so much for me the light in photographs that I’ve been attracted to, it is the experience of light in my life that interested me in photography.” – Adam Fuss
“We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet… It’s what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I’m saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.” – Adam Fuss
“I would say that the lens is a manipulation of an image. To me the photogram is a non-manipulation of the object and the interaction of the object with light and the direct recording of that. To me that’s pure photographic imagery. As soon as you have a lens, you’re reinterpreting the outside world.” – Adam Fuss
“I see the photogram as being much more truthful and much more honest because it’s just recording light. There is no manipulation of that light, in the way that a lens manipulates light.” – Adam Fuss
“An echo is a good way to describe the photogram, which is a visual echo of the real object. That’s why I like to work with the photogram, because the contact with what is represented is actual. It’s as if the border between the world and the print is osmotic.” – Adam Fuss
“All of photography is the recording of light. It is all representational.” – Adam Fuss
“The scale is one of the things that makes an image more honest.” – Adam Fuss
“What strikes the inside of our eyes is completely open to interpretation. We don’t know what strikes the inside of our eyes because our brain gets in the way. What strikes the inside of the eyes is upside down for start. So if the brain can do that, it can do anything. We learn a lot of things about seeing. We learn how to see.” – Adam Fuss
“Just do it until you figure out what you are doing. Then you do some more. Well, for myself I find that I need to do something again and again before I understand what it is that I am actually doing.” – Adam Fuss
Read more in our conversation here.
View 12 Great Photographs Collections here.
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Photographers’ Quotes.
View more in The Essential Collection Of Photographers Videos.
Adam Fuss’ photograms encourage you to think about photography, in different ways and much more broadly. His life-sized camera-less photograms represent one man’s attempt to work with, explore, and see subjects, media, and perception more directly. By making camera-less images, Fuss eliminates many distortions inherent in optical systems that employ lenses.
The turning point in Adam Fuss’ work came when he accidentally processed a piece of film that recorded only a grain of dust and its shadow. He had the sensitivity to see something extraordinary in this ordinary moment. Since then, he’s explored many ways of making photograms, including producing images from the chemical reactions created by photosensitive materials coming in contact with viscera and decaying objects.
Fuss’ photograms highlight the idea of the photograph as a trace made by light that has come in direct contact with the thing recorded. Fuss takes this one step further in his photograms, as the objects, not just the light reflected from them, literally make contact with the recording device, which becomes the final art object. Akin to abstract painting, the thing made represents itself more than the subject.
In Fuss’ work, the absence of light reveals as much or more as the presence of light, reversing our conventional expectations of photographs (‘light drawings). This is more than just ironic – it’s insightful.
Like Plato’s The Allegory Of The Cave, where men raised in a cave are bound in such a way that they only see shadows and mistake them for the real things not just reflections of reality, Fuss’ photograms ask us to consider the limited nature of our perceptions and not to confuse the recordings we make with the things themselves.
Read my extended conversation with Adam Fuss here.
Find out more about my influences here.