Raymond Depardon – Review

When asked whose work inspired me or influenced me, I am frequently at a loss for an answer. My first couple of years in photography were mostly in Miami, surrounded by wannabe fashion photographers and models. There are of course excellent professionals there, but I was inclined more toward conceptual photography and Miami simply didn’t have much of what I was looking for. My search for my own style and work was mostly an autistic experience, with input limited by a very tight group of non-photographer friends.

What I can answer is that I enjoy certain photographers’ work, but not in a way that I consider influences my work. It is usually an image that speaks to me on an individual and personal level and that I would like (or have) on my wall, but it is not an image that affects how I create my own images. Occasionally I identify with what it likely meant to see something and want to capture it in the same way as the photographer presented the image.

“If I had seen that I would have done the same,”  is what I think, and this is very different from thinking: “I want to do that too, or I wish I had done that.”  By saying this, I have no intent to put myself in the same class as the photographer in question famous, dead, alive or unknown. I mean it  instead is an understated affirmation that the image is beautiful and perfect–that I think nothing could be done differently to make the picture better in a way that resonates with what I imagine I would  have felt if confronted with that same scene.

This implies relating to a photographer in a way that only another photographer can. And so, ever so rarely, I find myself in consistent sentimental solidarity with the works  of a particular photographer. Actually, the only one that happens to me with is Raymond Depardon.

I discovered Depardon‘s book Voyages in a pile of damaged books being sold at Casa Lamm  in Mexico. The book cost two dollars and I thought it could be interesting. It stayed on my shelves for months before I really looked through it. I now keep it close to me, this tarnished paperback with powerful but discreet pictures. You choose and develop friendships when you meet people and hear their stories and discourse. There exists a baseline of affinities in friendships.

I’ve never met Depardon, but by what I know of his pictures I imagine I would enjoy him as a friend.

In an interview he says, ” Travel has led me to discover my own life, and quite simply to discover love.  I have this eternal obsession with the idea of loving a woman and taking her with me on a journey. “