Composition Is A Side Issue. Its Role

When We Describe A Process, Or Make Out An Invoice, Or Photograph A Tree, We Create Models; Without Them We Would Know Nothing Of Reality And Would Be Animals.

The Year Is Always Correct, Also The Month, Only The Day Can Be Another. But That Occurs To Me Only In The Moment Of Writing It Down.

Pictures Are The Idea In Visual Or Pictorial Form; And The Idea Has To Be Legible, Both In The Individual Picture And In The Collective Context - Which Presupposes, Of Course, That Words Are Used To Convey Information About The Idea And The Context. However, None Of This Means That Pictures Function As Illustrations Of An Idea: Ultimately, They Are The Idea. Nor Is The Verbal Formulation Of The Idea A Translation Of The Visual: It Simply Bears A Certain Resemblance To The Meaning Of The Idea. It Is An Interpretation, Literally A Reflection.

The Painter Sees The Semblance Of Things And Repeats It. That Is, Without Fabricating The Things Himself, He Fabricates Their Semblance; And, If That No Longer Recalls Any Object, This Artificially Produced Semblance Functions Only Because It Is Scrutinized For Likeness To A Familiar - That Is, Object-related - Semblance.

I Remember That I Felt I Had To Avoid All These Sensational Photos, The Hanged Woman, The Man Who Shot Himself, And So Forth. I Collected A Great Deal Of Material, Including A Number Of Banal, Irrelevant Photos, And Then In The Course Of My Work I Came Back To The Very Pictures I Had Actually Wanted To Avoid, Which Summed Up The Various Stories.