It is part of a photographers job to see more more intensely than most people do

Tim Flach:
(exert from Photo-Wisdom, Lewis Blackwell)


Taking a picture was initially an almost voyeuristic thing.  At the beginning I was not given the opportunity to do big projects, but I would be commissioned to go and photograph somebody or something.  These jobs could be as diverse and everyday as recording a factory pickling gherkins, or shooting a portrait of a designer of a new bike - but it allowed me to go into different worlds, expose myself to different things.


Then I started to see photography was a way of creating a doorway for somebody else to find other things.  You can have signs in the image that have a potential to take people somewhere else.  You may not understand everything that is there, but you can have a sense for it.  So I might have an image of a neck of a horse: at one level it is a horse, in another way people might see it more as a mountain, but having heard people discussing it, I see they can find other associations.  Photographs have this potential for layering many interpretations, ambiguity, which makes photography very special.  But still it has this ultimate strength, in that something existed at some point in front of the lens; if that ingredient is maintained, respected, then you have the potential for people to find alot of connections out of that original moment that you may never have anticipated, that you could never anticipate.

Tim Flach (UK) is a photographer best known for his highly conceptual portraits of animals, particularly horses. His images of animals are considered a departure from traditional wildlife photography and he has been described as “a potent example of a commercially trained photographer who’s now reaching a global audience through the boom in fine art photography.” He is the author of the book Equus.


Tim's Website is worth a look just for the homepage!
http://www.timflach.com/