Sheila Metzner
[Photographer, b. 1939, Brooklyn, New York, lives in New York.]
Photographers are often transformed by their own work. They should look at themselves every now and again to make sure they haven't become some kind of beast.
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I’m just a photographer. I’ve been on this journey that started with photographing what I loved the most, and what I loved the most.
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The photograph is something, in its highest form that I am giving for my effort. It is not something that I take. And then after I bring it back, develop it, print it, look at it, experience it again, I submit my experience to life. I give it back to the world it came from. Light into darkness. Darkness into light.
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There’s content in a great image that can be really powerful, and can even be sacred.
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My mother was so poor that she couldn’t afford an encyclopedia so the salesman gave her two volumes from A to E. But in those volumes were Africa, Antarctica, Egypt. From the beginning, the strangeness of mankind was appealing to me, and I wanted to see it myself and document it myself.
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