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.
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.
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.
There’s content in a great image that can be really powerful, and can even be sacred.
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.
