Les Artistes

WILL MCBRIDE

Will McBride, born 1931, is a photographer in reportage, art photography and book illustration. He is also known as a painter and sculptor. In the following excerpt taken from Will’s official website he speaks about his views on photography:

A Photographer has only one thing to give to his photography. His whole being. The photographs should be the result of this involvement with the life around him.

Each photographer, beeing a unique in dividual, resorting to his unique and individual experience, should produce work of unique and exeptional quality.

A photographer, in order to give his utmost , must be able to recognize his own beeing by the study of it, making constantnote of the growth or regression of his beeing, or stagnation of his beeing in order to confront the life around him and withhin him and to position himself in order to make the picture.

All photographs are “made” , not taken.

Without the feeling of responsibility to the audience, perhaps the mere taking of pictures could be considered an immoral act.

The responsibility to the public should be even greater than to the means of con veying the photograph to the public, be it thourgh a magazine and the editors of that magazine, or a book and the publisher of that book or a movie, and the producers of that movie, for all these conveyors of the photographer’s experience as expressed in his photographs are essentially commercial enterprises selling the commodity of visual experience and entertainment. For methe true meaning of photography or the fundamental endeavore of the photographer is to notice, measure, relate the visual evidence of the changes of the development or the destruction (which ever you prefer) of the life and society going on around.

The photographer automatically chooses his subject matter in relationship to the extension of his beeing for it is the path of the photographer through his life that is registered on his photographs and as such is autobiographical.