Photography has gone through quite a few changes in the last quarter of a century.
Back in 1992 I was teaching black and white photography at a community college. That means darkrooms, chemistry, and film for those that can't remember a time without the Internet. Back then, there were digital contraptions we laughed at because of their bulkiness, their expense, and the horrid images they produced. No way was digital even approaching what chemical photography could do. And we were right... at least in 1992. Jump five years to 1997 and there were now little digital cameras that we still laughed at because of their expense and the amateur images they produced. It would take decades before digital could be used for professional work... or so we thought. Jump just another five years to 2002. Who was laughing now? By this time, professional cameras like the Nikon D100 and the Canon EOS 1D were out and film was losing ground... and fast. These cameras were more than adequate to handle professional work, and did. By 2005... not even five years later... I saw the writing on the wall, slammed my head on that wall, and left both teaching and photography for a long time. Digital had taken over and I was not prepared for that change. For me, the magic of seeing a print appear from a blank sheet of paper was gone, turned into ones and zeros and a mess of digital gibberish. I could not see myself making students spending long hours in a darkroom when digital was obviously the future. Change for those entrenched in chemistry and film was slow, and it was time to let go. All of that said, I never hated digital imaging. It had, and still has, a lot of advantages to traditional film and chemical photography. There was no standing around bored as you processed film, no long hours in the dark printing, no chemical smell on your clothes when you got home. Slide presentations could now be created quickly and professionally with software -- gone were the days of tedious hours creating title slides for presentations that had to be shown on a screen in an unlit room. The greatest advantage to digital, at least with how I see the world, is its ability to show a visual representation of how people think, what goes through their mind, what kinds of things interest them. Because of the long hours it took to create images chemically, many images just didn't see the light of day. With the advent of the digital imaging and the vehicle of the Internet, it is now possible to see hundreds of images by the same person, and that allows us to see into that photographers mind and their view of reality. The ease of which one can create a photographic image to communicate with has great power, and this has allowed digital imaging to become one of the most interesting ways to see how a society reflects upon itself. But I also began to realize something more personal was going on. There was a shift on how I worked with my images, something that I would have never given up when I shot film, but now find somewhat redundant. But I'll get to that in the next post.
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By now you may have noticed I am more interested in why we do what we do rather than in the technical aspects of how we do what we do. There are a lot of places you can go on the Internet that have explanations of software and technique, but far fewer discussions on the meanings behind our images. This might be because writing a step-by-step process, although sometimes tedious, is not necessarily difficult. You have a starting point, a direction, a goal to complete. I know... I've written them before.
Once we need to discuss how we feel about something, things get murky and more personal. Think about the last time someone asked you why you shot in black and white, or why you shot that dead bird or crack in the wall (after 30 years, my wife still asks me that). Not so easy to come up with an answer, is it? How do you explain how you feel, how you experience? Our images hint towards our innermost sentiments and how we think the world works. They are not to be taken lightly, and as such, can be difficult to explain. Our assumptions about the world move us towards making certain kinds of images, and our feelings change how that world appears. To communicate photographically, we need to see how these assumptions change our images in the process. If I am uncomfortable (let's say its really cold outside while I'm trying to take a landscape shot), I tend to rush so I can get somewhere warm, and end up with less than stellar results. That in turn gets me upset, and things just go from bad to worse. But if I'm wearing a warmer coat and the cold isn't affecting me as much, I tend to enjoy what I'm doing and the exact same scene ends up as a magical moment. My perception of cold altered my view and in turn altered my photography. How do we control our perceptions in such a way as to not color our world? In short, we don't. We will always perceive the world is some fashion... that's what makes our images different from all the other images out there. If we didn't view the world differently, we would see nothing but the exact same portrait angles, the same snowscapes, the same product shots. Sure, sometimes it does feel we are seeing the same images again and again (especially in the age of "look what I'm eating today"), but for the most part we really do see some amazing images out there. And if we look at their backstory, the reasoning behind making the images, we realize they are a view into the mind of the photographer that created them. The problem, as I see it, is the number of images taking up our precious time. Social media -- advertising on multiple cable channels -- the ease of which images may be produced -- all have contributed to our need to walk away from studying what we are looking at. We look at an image for a split second, decide if it is worth our time, then walk away. This isn't really new, of course. I read somewhere that the average time someone looks at a painting in a museum is something under 30 seconds. For some viewers, that might be a generous estimate. Because we are all rushing about, we miss a great deal of the communication going on around us. By slowing down our viewing time, we can connect with the photographer and see how their mind works, how their perceptions color the world. A photograph is not to be viewed in a moment just because it was captured in a moment. Thought and emotion was put into its creation, and those qualities can be transmitted to the viewer if they take the time to let it happen. So what do we do when we take the time to look? We could, for instance, consider the compositional features of a photograph, but I find I tend to stop at that if I don't like what I see. The way I compose an image may not be the way another photographer does, and that jars with my sense of reality, so I ignore everything else. Instead, I would suggest thinking about what emotional responses we have to an image, and by an image, I mean ANY image. We often do not realize we are having a response to an image unless it is something like "oh that's a beautiful landscape / portrait / wedding shot (insert whatever image you happen to really like here)". If the image is something other than that, something we don't get an immediate response to, we fail to realize there is an emotion there, just not as strong or obvious. By taking some time to focus on our emotional response, we can lead ourselves down a path towards appreciating the art we see. That crack in the wall might be a statement of the decay of society; the dead bird becomes a view into the fragility of life; clouds become wild horses, the play of light and shadow the mysteries of things yet to come. Take time to perceive the world through another's eyes. You may be surprised at what you find. |
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