I’m moving website platforms and am adding back all my blog posts from my previous sites. Here’s what I thought back in 2018. Not necessarily what I think now, but to be honest I can’t even be bothered to re-read it right now.
Draft
I just want to say what it means to me. And what photography really, objectively stands for, I outright have no idea. Photography intuitively seems like the most objective art form, with less ambiguity than painting, music, everything else – at the first glance. But it’s this direct connection to reality that even films don’t have that pushes me off track. I think many people are torn over the question whether photography is documentary in nature, or as freely artistic as painting. I am as well.
Obviously, it’s narrow minded to put artificial boundaries of what photography “is” and “isn’t”, of course photography is… when you shoot with a camera, and then whatever you do with the result is still photography, right? Maybe. I think it doesn’t really matter if you call this one process “photography”, and the other one “photo manipulation”, etc. But to me, photography means a very specific thing, or maybe not that specific. I’d put it another way – photography has a certain strength that no other medium seems to have, except cinema, but even then it’s not as strong there, because we are used to cinema being majorly fiction.
Photography is associated with truth – journalistic, documentary, even family photos kind of truth. If you see a photograph, say, of a starving African child – the famous one with the vultures for example – you get all sorts of thoughts and feelings, but they are all cemented by the fact that you assume that it happened. And the questions you ask – they are “is it real?”, “how did it happen?”, “how did he manage to take that photo?”, and you get genuine feelings for the subject, usually, too. But if it was a painting, your questions would be “why did he paint that?”, “what did the artist feel to make him paint this?”. What I am trying to say is this very basic thing that photography is more connected to reality while other art forms are connected to the authors’ feelings and inner world. Even in cinema we are used to worlds being constructed and created, even when they are set in our modern, everyday environments.
So, there are two major ways to do photography: to create what isn’t there, and to truthfully convey what is.
Both are challenging in their own ways, but I think that while the former is challenging technically, the latter is challenging in different ways, it is less demanding in technique but requires a sharp perception, sincerity of the author.
What I mean by truthful photographs, is when they convey reality. Always through the lens of the author (literally), but still, reality:
[Yeah… The last one is totally staged. I know now.]
And then there’s everything else. It’s very easy to lie in photography. When you paint, write, it’s harder to lie – you’re still expressing yourself, and that’s the purpose in the first place. But in photography, if you’re expected to deliver not just your perception, but truth as well. And that’s why it’s very easy to lie – to craft a narrative that didn’t exist prior. You can isolate a beautiful frame, find an interesting person, building, angle – you often do – but it’s so simple to forget the real atmosphere of the moment, of the place where you took the shot. It’s much easier to try to take a pretty photo than to try to take a truthful one. Because they usually aren’t pretty, or often seem subjective, and it’s discouraging. It’s more alluring to take a pretty shot, a simple shot, with its own story. And nobody would know that this story wasn’t what actually took place.
To me, that’s what I hope to learn through photography. Taking pretty shots is hard, and taking them while maintaining a sense of documentary, “journalistic” integrity is even harder. We’ll see.
PS: Obviously, that’s not to say at all that taking non-documentary photos is easier, or less artistic. People learn for long periods of time to gain enough skill to shoot, convincingly, photos that contain crafted narratives, and there’s a lot of merit to that. In my terms, I’d say most films are made like that – they create a world that isn’t there, but convince us to believe in it. And I love and respect film as an art form, of course. Some of my favourite photographers are what I’d call “untruthful”. It’s not a “bad” thing by any means. Check these two guys out, for instance: