Currently, I have three photography-related books which I am slowly getting through, but of these, one has struck me quite a bit on a personal level, and that is David duChemin’s Photographically Speaking, which despite its size, is fairly hefty, and its content even more so.
Perhaps by coincidence, I also read today an extract of Geraldine Brook’s 2011 ABC Boyer Lecture, Seeing light through others’ eyes. The title alone sounds photographic, but it’s in fact about writing. However, some of her points are salient to the photographer.
Both works, at their core, deal with an issue that any arts philosophy student may be familiar with: how does one translate what they see into an artform, which will allow others to see through your eyes? How can we create lenses through which our readers (and duChemin is careful to state that photos are “read” as opposed to just “viewed”) can see the world as we do? What can we do, so people who see our work are subject to the same shift in consciousness as Brooks experienced in a mathematics lecture?
It wasn’t that I understood her work, but I understood her vision. I realised I had lived, until that moment, in an airlock, and that she was prizing open the heavy door, just a crack. In the sudden brief shaft of light, I glimpsed a sliver of the world beyond, the world in which she lived…
I could imagine what it was to see with her eyes, to feel with her heart…
I understood her feeling on peering through that crack into the other person’s consciousness. It’s a lot more literal when you are talking about photos since you literally see what the artist saw in the scene. But at the same time, there is a melancholic sense of disconnect.
I know now that it is a beautiful world, but I also know that I can’t live there.
When I see the work of inspiring photographers, a part of me despairs at the sheer beauty of their work. I know, more than ever that I am not them. I can never be them. That I can never have their eyes or their vision. That even if I had that same scene before my eyes, I would have been unable to see the beauty they have so perfectly crystallised within that frame.
But in that same breath, I realise that I don’t want to be them. While I will never be “good enough”, I want to be myself, to leverage all my experiences and feelings into creating a work of art that is my very own, and that my interpretation of a scene is as valid anyone else’s, and eventually my own work will take on a fierce beauty of its own which will be at least equal to theirs.
Some readers might know that in my day job I am a journalist. I work with words. It’s not a very inspirational or imaginative job – I am not a novelist, but I am pretty good with words.
With photography, it started as a weekend distraction, and quickly grew to become somewhat of an obsession. Photography was my creative outlet, apart from forming words. To me, writing and photography was separate, but now, I realise, they’re both sides of the same coin. On a philosophical level at least, I am realising the commonalities between both art forms.
It’s important to note that in my personal philosophy, I aspire to the creation of art, which I see as a level beyond the simple craftsmanship involved in both photography and writing. To put it simplistically, the craft of photography is knowing the techniques and apertures and lighting. The art of photography is what we are talking about now – the communication of emotion and expression and vision. It’s something I am still in the beginning stages of learning about.
Writing may aspire to art, but it begins as craft.
Brook’s piece also talked about such an evolution of a personal vision, from being a craftsman putting words together, to aspiring to “build a bridge to the moon”.
The same is true of photography.
In duChemin’s book, he tells us that photographers have a language. That is photographs are not just a capture of “what’s there” but rather, as photographers we have ultimate control over the elements of a photo. Of course, it’s all too easy to press the shutter button and just say “we captured what was there”. We all do it. I do it all the time.
But the fact is, things are in the photo because we allow them to be. We could hide stuff in shadow, blow it out in highlights, crop it from the frame, blur it with aperture control, move our perspective, move objects, wait for conditions to be right, etc. That’s what we learn the craft for.
And those things you read about colours and lines and the emotions they induce? They’re not just silly Freudian bullshit. However clumsily couched they are (usually as “rules”), they are the little motes of vocabulary which make up a photo. These are elements that have been used in countless paintings and photos in the past. They are encoded into our collective imagination and culture, and every time we invoke such elements in our pictures, the entire history of sentiment lies behind them, and our readers feel the significance and associations of that element.
Having an individual vision of what you are seeing, knowing what you want to express, thinking it through, then using your skills in the craft of photography to commit the vision to a permanent form on the sensor, negative or paper – now that’s the challenge. That’s what separates your run-of-the-mill camera owner from the photographer.
It’s a hard road to follow. Especially in today’s digital age, where cameras are everywhere, and capturing an image has never been easier. When you see people all around you snapping pictures at ten frames per second, dare you take a few minutes to consider your intent, and go through the process of deliberately framing and lighting, before taking that one frame? Perhaps it’s a matter of putting the value back into the single image when you take it.
Without [vision], we are engaging in little more than accidentally exposing light to film of sensor.
As a writer, words are not readily committed to a page unless the piece has been reviewed two or three times. Neither do we put random words into our sentences. Everything is thought through so the particular piece of writing conveys certain meanings with little ambiguity.
Why then, are we as photographers happy to put out pieces of work that have random elements in them, that have no particular expression behind them, no clear intent? The fact is, if photographers feel that they should be rated as artists on the same level as authors or songwriters (to take duChemin’s examples), we need to be much more thoughtful about what we do.