Pepijn Sauer

About Pepijn Sauer

I was supposed to write something about myself here, but as much as there is to say about photography there is little to say about photographers. Photography is mostly a subconscious activity, an activity that demands attention and not reflection, awareness and not thought. As Cartier Bresson said: "Be there, don't think, forget yourself". Most of the photographers' job is to see, to forget and to be forgotten. Therefore I will write a little bit about photography.

After more than a hundred years of photography our relationship to it is more intimate yet even more strenuous than it used to be. Most of the reason for that is because we want photography to be things it is not. Photography crosses boundaries as if they don't really exist; it not only resists our definitions but questions our dichotomies: Real/Fake, True/Untrue, Fact/Fiction, Objective/Subjective, Art/Document.

Photography can perhaps be described as the tentative discovery of a language of whom no one knows the grammar and only few even know any vocabulary, yet it is a language that speaks to everyone. It is a language of contrasts, of shapes, of framing and composition, of sharpness and blurs. It is a language expressed in transformations of light. It is a language eminently suited for the subconscious to express itself, and therefore it is also a language of discovery.

Photography has not usefully been described in terms outside of its own vocabulary. Like its successful products it is an "itself", something autonomous that may interact in many ways but always retains its own idiosyncratic and elusive character. A photo is not a representation of reality. It is not even a representation of a perception of reality. It is a perceptual object in its own right. The eye does not see reality, the camera does not capture perception, or, as Gary Winogrand has expressed it: "I make photos to see what the world looks like photographed."