Why Photography?

This seems like a good place to start, doesn’t it? Why do I take pictures? Or as Ansel Adams would say, “make photographs”. The former implies a rather passive procedure, like taking the last slice of pie, while the latter is, at its very core, about creation; to MAKE a pie is quite a bit different from taking the last slice (to paraphrase Carl Sagan, “To make a pie, you must first create the universe.”). But now we’re already off topic (great way to kick things off, and now I want pie). I’ll come back around to the ‘taking’ and the ‘making’ of photos in another post (spoilers!), but for now, back to the topic at hand:

Why do I do photography?

For me, photography is NOT primarily a creative or artistic endeavor; there’s not much thought around the “creation” of “art” when I point my camera at something that’s caught my eye. That is to say, the end photograph is almost never a consideration when I click that shutter button. Photography is an experiential endeavor for me (and quite often an experimental one), but it’s not even really about the experience of photographing. I don’t get much joy or fulfillment fiddling around with camera settings and whatnot (Ben Horne calculating reciprocity failure I’m not). It’s about ALL the experiences that led to the photograph; all the things the image doesn’t show. It’s about the hike to get to that location. It’s about the unseen bird whose song directed my gaze upon the scene. It’s about the experience of being soaked to the bone, either from the freezing rain, or sweat from the summer heat.

And my photos are ABOUT all these things, but OF none of them. They’re a bookmark so to speak, linking my memory of that past experience to my present life. I can look at a photo I made 20 years ago and remember where it’s from. In a way, it becomes proof that I was there, where in that moment of time, I experienced life.

Birthday Cake

For instance, I know that I’ve been to Yosemite because I have photos from the trip. I haven’t seen them in decades, but I remember what’s in them—I remember taking them nearly forty years ago. And I remember WHY I took them. The “rainbow” caused by the sunlight passing through the spray from Vernal Falls and the nearly perfect reflection of the trees in the aptly named Glass Lake. Those scenes were awe inspiring, but there was no sense of creating anything when I pressed the shutter button on my disc camera (yeah, I used to shoot film too). The creating had already been done and I was fortunate enough to be blessed by the beauty of it.

But it’s not because I have those photos that I remember all that. No, those photos exist (somewhere in a box actually) because there was a moment in the distant past when I stepped out of my HEAD long enough to recognize in the REAL WORLD something worth remembering. My camera links me to that past reality. It is so easy for me to experience life through my thoughts of it rather than through the living of it. Photography is my lifeline, grounding me in the real world, and each image, no matter how trivial or mundane, represents a moment when I lived.

So for me, photography isn’t really about creativity or art, it’s about life.