The One Place To Stand

"....the challenge of finding the one place to stand from which the world, compressed into two dimensions within the picture's frame, makes sense of itself."

(Peter Galassi in his monograph for Andreas Gursky's 2001 MoMA exhibition.)

For me, this quote cuts through all the the tangled thickets to a clear space.  What else do you hope for, when you peer through the viewfinder, than that the world for a split second will make sense of itself? 

Here is another quote from the same source.  This time he is talking about looking at a photograph rather than taking one.

"The world can seem richer and more generous in disclosing its meanings when we are freed from its pressing fullness to contemplate its fixed, flattened image on a piece of paper."

I read this as meaning that a photograph is a distillation.  Like a good whisky it is the result of a process and so becomes something more than a mixture of its ingredients.