catherine h. noren
With My Back to the Future
As a child, I was enamored of family albums—I spent hours poring over the magic reality they revealed. In 1977, Alfred A. Knopf published a family album that I wrote and produced. It’s called “The Camera of My Family,” and it contains just some of the answers to the mysteries I spent so much time pondering as a little girl.
Embarking on serious photography of my own, I haunted the streets of Manhattan, photographing the action around me. I took courses with the world’s great street shooters—Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model-- to learn to see what they saw, and how they saw it. I went to work at Magnum Photos, cataloging the contact sheets of great photojournalists.
I began to value what I shot by how I was paid for it. I photographed in corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street’s trading floors, in Sing Sing, and on exotic journeys to the north of Argentina and the south of Iceland. I was paid, and published—in brochures, magazines, and annual reports. My personal work was exhibited, and collected.
Today, I see reality, perhaps, differently than I did—or I see a different reality. I’m less interested in documentary photography; my enchantment is with the ways of shadows, shapes, size, color and scale, and how dark and light behave, in the juxtaposition of elements.
Albeit I recognize that photography and reality have increasingly less in common with each other, my original loyalty remains. The tools of photomanipulation are increasingly sophisticated and increasingly tempting, but I use them sparingly.