Cassius Clay, 19, running by pier, Miami, Florida. Circa 1961. Flip Schulke.
I recently started watching the Ken Burns film on Muhammad Ali (I tend to watch things in 20-30 minute chunks, so I’m not done yet). Even after having watched just the intro, I had some thoughts I wanted to share. Consider this post similar to those “reaction videos” you see on YouTube, but a serious one.
“I dislike studio photography because it’s not spontaneous. Anything you could go back and do five minutes, five months or five years later is not a great picture; you’ve lost the spontaneity… Studio photography is not really photography — it’s dress designing.”
“To me, a good photograph is a glimpse and gone forever. It can never happen again; it’s spontaneous. The Beatles will never have another pillow fight…”
Harry Benson CBE
This quote is from the October 2021 issue of Digital Camera World. I don’t single-mindedly adhere to the quote’s ethos, but I understand, respect, and try to harness its point of view.
There are many ways to analyze the practice and history of photography. I’m an armchair art historian, but I do believe one of the most fundamental axes running through photography has staged photography at one end of the spectrum and spontaneous photography at the other.