Monday
3 December 2007
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What do I take pictures for?

Over the last few months I’ve been asking myself a question that is particularly difficult to answer. Why do I take pictures? The obvious answer to a lot of people is because I enjoy it and I’ve been told I produce things that people like when I do it. But this doesn’t really satisfy me as an answer because it doesn’t say what it is about it that I enjoy and if the reason I do it is so that people can tell me I’m good, I feel particularly shallow.

So now I’ve got a few more questions. What do I enjoy about photography? Apart from my own enjoyment, what am I trying to acheive?

Well this gets a little closer. I started off taking photographs and enjoying it before I showed other people so it can’t be to do with that – or was I expecting or wanting to impress other people – the joy of anticipation perhaps. Oh dear..

Let’s take a couple of thought experiments. If I were to carry on photography but I could never show anybody else my work, would I still do it. Gosh! That’s a tough one. I think my answer would have to be yes. I actually enjoy the process of taking landscape photographs. Starting with the location and ending with an interpretation that I think captures my intentions is a complex puzzle that I get a ‘buzz’ out of solving. The buzz is even more exciting but also more frustrating because there is no one correct answer and there is also no way of saying whether the answer is correct.

So I like puzzle solving. Solving the puzzle also means learning what the puzzle is; What the pieces do and where can I put them. This means there is an ongoing learning process to solve the puzzle. Hang on! Learning the puzzle also means knowing how to judge the answer better. The obvious conclusion from this is that depending on how you learn to understand the puzzle can affect your conclusions on whether the puzzle is actually solved. In other words, my great solution is actually wrong in somebody elses eyes.

This leads to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what I do as long as I learn the puzzle in a way that lets me solve it. This is obviously not right… There must be something I’m missing.

Whatever I say about not caring about what people think about my pictures it isn’t totally true. When I’ve solved my own puzzles in a particularly satisfying way, I really would like to share this. I want to say “look – here’s my solution!” and I want to share it with people who go “Wow.. although I have a different solution personally, I know enough about the puzzle to admire the way you’ve solved it” or “Hang on – here is a bit of the puzzle you might not have thought about – does that change the way you perceive your solution”..

So now we have start to put together an environment of shared understanding of what the puzzle is. The general public (sorry general!) have a personal understanding of the puzzle that they have inherited/developed without thought and some of my solutions might also look like some of their solutions.. Some people have spent their whole lives looking at different solutions and have developed a language to describe them that I don’t understand myself (I think they are called critics) and then there are a whole lot of people who publish ‘Solve your puzzle the easy way’ books with lists of simple solutions that look complete (I think they’re called editors and writers).

What I have to decide is how many different types of person (and hence puzzle types) do I want to satisfy. Some photographers manage to produce work that satisfies many, many different people understanding of the puzzle, even puzzle afficianados (Joe Cornish seems to have hit a few of the core puzzle fundamentals but does so whilst also satisying some of the deeper understandings).

Dumping that metaphor, what I’m getting at with the puzzle is a combination of many things.. There are visual configurations that are pleasing to the eye; there are structures that can lead the eye around a picture; there are types of texture and light that are associated with warm fuzziness (a technical term I think). All of these are aspects of photography that invoke our hindbrain. These are shared visual triggers that can evoke emotional reaction. A photographer that wants to control the reaction to their pictures needs to understand these fundamental concepts. We can think about these concepts as the grammar of language. If we use the grammar correctly, we will always produce sentences – whether they carry meaning depends on the right words.

Then there are more complex visual ideas that rely on a shared visual language. Some of this shared visual language is innate (like some of the ideas mentioned in the last paragraph) but some of the ideas are learnt through exposure to photography/art. Fine art is drenched in these metaphors and allusions. With photography the availability of language is more limited. With landscape photography, I’m still looking for a beginners dictionary.

What I want to achieve at minimum is to express my feelings when I’m out in the landscape. What I’d like to achieve is to be able to control how I express my feelings through photography – how to transcend the basic grammar of beauty and be able to communicate a message that whispers long sentences rather than shouting one liners.

What I also know is that I’ll never reach my goal because as I learn more about the way this visual language works, I’ll expect more of myself. I wrote a footer on my profile on a photo discussion site about 18 months ago that said ‘Tim Parkin – Happily Unsatisfied’. I wrote it quickly from the top of my head and then thought ‘How sad does that sound’ .. over the last 12 months I’ve realised that being unsatisfied is not necessarily a bad thing.. Small doses of satisfaction are good but to be completely satisfied all of the time, I don’t think I would enjoy it.

So .. why do I take pictures? I take pictures to express something; to myself, to understanding colleagues and peers. I take pictures to learn how pictures work. I take pictures to understand what I see and how I can transform it. I take pictures to learn about the world; to learn about myself; to talk to other people about the journey I’m taking..

I’m hoping that as I get further down the journey I can more eloquently express myself too :-)

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