Photographer Vincent Versace talks with host Ibarionex Perello at Candid Frame about what matters to him. A lot of it applies to poetry or any art form, including living generally. It’s about an hour long in all but well worthwhile.
For example, “There’s a certain point in your career, or when you do this a lot, in any art form, where you can look at your work and you know what is good and bad without ego. You can look at it and say, that’s crap, that’s okay and this is really good.”
He talks about strobe light vs. sunlight. He points out any point of artificial light is to achieve natural light. In poetry we can replicate something in the world by a complex route but making the simplest possible without simplification is the elegant solution. It doesn’t reward our egos the same when something comes easily but it’s important to stop when something. It’s rare to overcook something until it cycles back to fresh.
He photographed Suu Kyi who said today to Baird of Myanmar, “A lot of dead people seem to be prepared to vote on the first of April. We can’t have that, can we?”
To Versace she said, “Access is granted if you do right by your pictures.”
It was a pivotal moment for him, pushing him forward. What would it mean, not to just take an excellent story with photos but to do Right?
He said he’s photographed a lot of people in his career with the “it quality” but she did something that no one else had done before. Whoever she talked to she could transfer the “it quality” to them.
He related a Mies van Der Rohe quote: “An interesting plainness is the most difficult thing to achieve”.
Equally true in poetry. For whatever decisions you make of what to include, exclude and at what density, or complexity, getting to the essential plainness that is interesting is key.