Grand Central Station by Ken Van Sickle
Excellent question. Ken Van Sickle’s answer is in this article and video that are part of the Brief But Spectacular series at PBS.
PBS: “For six decades, Ken Van Sickle has been quietly producing photographs in his darkroom, located in the center of Manhattan. His photos range from documenting the bohemian life of New York and Paris in the 1950s and ’60s to pushing the limits of the medium itself.”
Ken:
“There are a lot of things that make a good photograph. You have to think about texture and gesture and composition, and all the things that painting has in it. Technology doesn’t change the way photography is. It just — it makes it available to more people, which means there’s going to be much, much more really terrible pictures taken or pictures that are totally dependent on subject, which is all, all right.
“If you were there when the Hindenburg caught on fire, and you took a picture of it, that’s a great photograph. But you’re not a great photographer, because you can’t repeat that in everyday things.
“What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves. My pictures don’t depend on extreme sharpness. They depend on the composition and on the subject and on the way I see it.
“My name is Ken Van Sickle. This is my Brief But Spectacular take on sharing what I see.”
The full article and video are here.
Links
A gallery of Ken Van Sickle’s work