I don’t have any recollection of the moment I became interested in taking pictures. There’s no childhood event to which I can trace my love for photography. No kindly relative or schoolteacher showing me my first camera. No inspirational moment that kindled the fires of artistic fervour. It has happened, like most things, very gradually. Almost imperceptibly what started as a whim has become something central to my life. So central, in fact, that I decided to create and publish this website so as to share my journey with others.
I can’t offer a simple answer to the question ‘Why Photography?’. But maybe I can approach an answer by trying to discover what has kept me coming back to it again and again. What is it about producing images that holds such a powerful sway over me and many others like me? After all a photographic image is, at first glance, merely a static object. It can be consumed entire with just such a momentary glance. Most of the images we encounter in our lives are bred and served for this kind of consumption. They are made to be seen and swiped away, their message loud and clear and bordering on obnoxious. Perhaps this hints at one motivation: we who labour over our images wish to imbue them with some significance beyond the superficial.
‘The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.’
— Aristotle
Images have never been more profuse. Countless billions are captured daily and in almost caustic resolution. There has been a kind of devaluation of the image caused by increased production. Just as a currency loses value when a government prints money, so the value of any one image has been diminished by their general proliferation. Perhaps photography appeals to me because I have grown up just as this wave of image-making crested and crashed and its undercurrents began to suck meaning out of life. Photography has become an attempt to reclaim some of that lost meaning. Not that I claim to have achieved this with any of my photographs - maybe I never will - but the idea that images can be more than just throw-away status indicators is a fascinating challenge.
Photography has had an interesting history. From scientific curiosity to technical mastery and pretensions of serious art in the hands of a few, to ubiquity in the hands of the masses; in terms of access no art form has experienced such wide dissemination in such a short space of time. A generation of photographers has come to the medium without the pretensions of previous practitioners. You don’t need to master the technicalities of photography in order to create well-exposed, high-resolution images when you have a smartphone in your pocket. Image-making has become divorced from mastery. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The idea that art and mastery are synonymous is a relic of the past. But the past has a habit of hanging around in the collective unconscious. Sudden ubiquity has thrown the art (or perhaps craft) of photography into sharper relief. The ease of image-making, the pixel-perfect clarity at the touch of a button, breeds a sense that something must be missing. We are naturally suspicious of things that come too easily. We want our claims to meaning to be justified by our efforts. We seek to purge superficiality by resurrecting the craft.
This also partly explains why many of us choose analogue over digital. Talking about how film ‘slows you down’ has become something of a cliche, but it is nonetheless true. The seemingly endless options available on modern digital cameras cause a flood of possibilities, threatening to drown creativity rather than enhance it. The appeal of analogue technology is that the process by which the particular properties of an image are conjured into existence remains opaque and to a greater extent outside of our control. Film is fickle. Those elements which do remain within our control are less prescribed by menu-diving and more open to creative interpretation. Digital feels digital. A well-engineered system of canals as opposed to a free-flowing river. To the extent that we might associate creativity with freedom, we naturally prefer analogue technology over digital. This greater sense of freedom allows us to believe that our images, when they are successful, are imbued with deeper meaning. It is interesting that a sense of freedom could be inspired by a comparative lack of options. Perhaps it shows that freedom is not always ‘freedom to…’ A proliferation of options at some point becomes a form of tyranny. Freedom most powerfully felt is often ‘freedom from…’
‘There is always, in the fine arts, a physical interface between the artist’s aesthetic vision and the material result he seeks … It is the mastery of the interface that comprises the artistry; it is what constitutes the ‘art’ in fine art.’
—Robert Breault
Freedom from digital determinism implies that our art might be less circumscribed. That the paths we might take are not reduced to a set of menu options. This openness is quite terrifying. There is a reason we don’t start out shooting on an 8x10 with full movements and printing on paper in a darkroom. The opportunities for error are dizzying. But it is in these opportunities that we sense the potential for mastery. Photography has existed long enough for there to be a legacy of masters. People who tamed the capricious nature of film and bent it to their artistic will.
To be fair, mastery exists in digital photography too. Making meaningful images is not easy whatever the medium chosen. But mastery of digital information comes down to a kind of deconstruction of the image into its computable components. RGB values, bit-depth, pixel density, histograms, these things appeal to a certain engineering mindset. But those who pursue ever finer control must divide the world into ever finer pieces and this risks undermining the creative process with narrowness of focus. Personally, if I am allowed to wallow in details I will happily do so, to the detriment of my artistic process.
The kind of mastery available to analogue photographers is different. It involves surrender. At the moment the shutter fires, how the light interacts with a layer of photoreactive salts is always unaccountable to analysis. The fine control of digital being absent, mastery must reside in the more intuitive side of our artistic personalities. We must master our approach. Our intention. Our receptiveness to light. We must learn to read the scene itself more closely. Deciphering the dance of light and shade. Perceiving the image amongst the chaos of reality, instead of attempting to tame the chaos after the fact with digital wizardry.
Intuition is undoubtedly also present in digital photography, but it is not foregrounded to the same extent, being mitigated by a surfeit of options, hidden behind the comforting notion that everything can be controlled. And whilst it is true that analogue photography also has the potential to get bogged down in details, the fact that there remains at the heart of the process this layer of unaccountable magic acts to guard against the artist assuming too much control. It is a constant reminder that perfection is unattainable and that the search for perfection leads to ever decreasing returns.
What this points to is the idea that mastery, in art, is not reducible to proficiency. There is a part of us that sees mastery as control. The artwork becomes a statement of our ability to bend the world to our will. Whereas I believe that true mastery is a kind of receptiveness. What must be mastered is not the world, but ourselves. In so doing we allow the world to be expressed through our engagement with it.
‘As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.’
—Ernst Fischer
One thing I know: I love mechanical cameras. There is something undeniable about a camera that requires no batteries to function perfectly. The mechanisms inside a fully mechanical camera could have been understood - at least in principle - by the ancient Greeks. The principles at work are visible to the naked eye. Springs, cogs and levers. Expertly machined parts working in synchrony to allow a precisely measured amount of light to pass an aperture with consistency and reliability. This is something that software running inside an inscrutable black box will never eclipse, however impressive the technological hurdles overcome to enable us to store light inside computer memory. It also means that mechanical cameras have greater longevity. One of my most used cameras is a Leica IIIa which was made in 1933. It’s 92 years old and still works perfectly. The design is so simple and elegant that I’m able to take it apart for servicing myself, something that I highly recommend you try if you are at all practically minded. Digital cameras purchase convenience at the cost of comprehension; they are highly practical in one respect, but miserably impractical in another.
But what of that practical respect in which digital is superior? Thousands of images without having to change a roll. Auto focus. Auto exposure. Variable ISO. High dynamic range. Sharp and well-exposed images time after time. These things are clear advantages from one point of view. I would argue, however, that artists don’t measure things purely in terms of practical worth. There has to be something at the heart of creativity can’t be reduced to utility alone. And it may be, as I have suggested, that these conveniences serve to hamper the artistic process, rather than enable it.
I don’t want to suggest that digital photography is not art, or digital photographers lesser artists. This is clearly nonsense. And for a professional photographer these practical considerations make a huge difference to the reliability and repeatability of their trade. What I am talking about is the actual hands-on experience of taking photos. The process as it unfolds. The tool in your hands and how it feels to operate. It is reasonable for a professional to want to streamline this process as much as possible, since their bottom line depends on efficiency of process. But for an amateur or an artist, the process is everything and shouldn’t be overlooked in favour of efficiency.
Clearly the mechanical and the analogue have a certain influence on the process that is missing in the digital approach. There are limits that nature places on purely mechanical solutions that enforce simplicity. On a mechanical camera there are rarely more that a few controls. Shutter speed, aperture, shutter release and film transport. Maybe a light-meter. Maybe a self-timer. This simplicity forces the photographer to think more carefully about the images they are making. It reduces the technological overhead and leaves more room for the act of creation to occur within us, rather than being channelled without through a series of menus and technical decisions. The physical act of using a mechanical camera makes the photographer more integral to the process.
And then there is the nature of film itself. The fact that the results are distant from the moment of creation - there is a wait of some hours, if not days, for the images to be developed. Some might see this as a major inconvenience and a relic of a less advanced past, but I think this distance is hugely important. (So much so that I turn off image preview on my digital cameras - meaning I don’t see the image I have just taken - and resist the urge to look at them until my memory card is full.) Being able to see the image immediately is dangerous for two related but opposite reasons. The closer you are to the act of creation, the more heightened your expectations become. This results in one of two situations:
The image doesn’t look as good on the screen as it did in my head. Not because it isn’t good, but because my expectations are heightened and reality fails to live up to these expectations.
The image looks better than it really is. This is because my heightened expectations have skewed my judgement in favour of assessing the image too positively.
In both of these situations the image seen is not truly representative of the image itself and has been tainted by my disposition at the time I viewed it. This results in either discarding the image, in which case I have lost something that may have ultimately proven fruitful; or it results in disappointment when I come to revisit the images later and I discover that my artistic triumph is not as good as I had assumed. Both situations put me at a disadvantage, creatively speaking.
However, if there is a distance between the creative act and seeing the result, my expectations have levelled out. I often have no recollection of the individual images on a roll of film. This allows me to judge them in a new and fairer light. As though I am seeing images taken by another person. This is because the images were taken by another person. When I took them I was different, my surroundings and state of mind were different. I can see them for what they are, not as something that must measure up, favourably or otherwise, to my expectations. I can think of no other art form where this is the case. Where the product of your artistic vision is distant in time from the act of bringing it into being.
‘To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.’
—Henri Cartier-Bresson
There are many other aspects of photography that make it appealing to me. But these three just discussed are the most significant:
Meaning - an attempt to reclaim the photographic image from the emptiness of ubiquity.
Mastery - photography as a craft, something that must be mastered and that compels the photographer to self-mastery.
Machinery - the physical pleasure of using mechanical cameras and the implications they have for the artistic process.
Photography speaks to several sides of my personality. I am a dreamer and a romantic (Meaning), I love learning new things (Mastery) and I love understanding how things work, taking things apart, fixing things (Machinery). I am also a creative person. I have a need to express myself. Photography combines these things in a unique way and this is why I love it.