George Eastman Museum

There is no correct or incorrect way to experience a photograph by Carl Chiarenza. He has long insisted that viewing his images is a personal and open-ended experience. Here’s Chiarenza in an interview from 2019 explaining what it is he hopes you, the viewer, might gain from looking carefully at his work: I only hope that the viewer can find her or his own something in what I make, and I have said this over and over again, that the pictures are made to be responded to in any way that is personal to the person looking at it and responding to it. I’m not trying to persuade people to do anything. I don’t photograph as many of the great photographers like my schoolmate Bruce Davidson—I don’t do that kind of thing—not because I don’t like doing that kind of thing, but because I’m not very good at it, and he is. So, what I’m doing is responding to things the way composers respond to sound, and hoping that there are people out there who will be affected by it in some way that affects them personally and has nothing