I Can See it For You Wholesale

One advantage photography has over some other media — in particular writing — is that with photography, one does not necessarily have to convey the sense that one understands what one is sharing with the viewer. A photographer (excluding those who are photographing scenes they have manufactured) is not an author, and is not assuming the kind of privileged position of understanding over the subject which the author is forced to carry — sometimes as a burden, sometimes as a badge of honor, sometimes as mating plumage.

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that an understanding of the subject has no value in photography, but I do think good photography can be done which is founded not on an understanding of what is being photographed, but on an exquisite incomprehension of it. One can behold a thing with great intensity and convey some part of that intensity to the viewer without necessarily having to get a grip on the subject, or even to really decide for sure what it is.

The challenge is to do this without giving the sense of hiding behind obscurity or engaging in puzzle games with the viewer. This is difficult, particularly if one is interested in reaching a wide range of viewers…

This is a cut and paste from something I just posted in a flickr thread in which some people talk about what software will give “creative” colors, and other folks talk about how creativity is something that has to happen in the camera, before post-processing.

Creativity isn’t something that happens in the camera anymore than it’s something that happens in a computer or in a darkroom. If someone uses textbook “good” composition, textbook “good” lighting, the “correct” depth of field, accurate exposure, and a standard subject, the result is not creative, any more than if they swap some colors in photoshop.

Creativity is something that happens in the photographer, and it can make use of any tool to hand — whether that tool is the camera or a computer, or whether it means manufacturing a scene to shoot.

However I would also caution that creativity is not necessarily a virtue, especially in a photographer. There are many fantastic photographs which are not “creative,” but are strictly documentary. They are a record of something which happened in the world. The photographer made the exposure, but they didn’t “create” the scene.

I really do think that much of what is good in photography has absolutely nothing to do with creativity. I would even perhaps go so far as to say that creativity is more likely to be a vice than a virtue when working in the photographic medium.

I am by nature, or at least lifelong habit, always apart from the world around me. Solipsism comes easily for me; connections comes hard. In the middle of a crowd, I am perhaps at my most alone, set off as I am by what I think of as my veil of indifference. Behind that barrier, I am free to live in my head and build pocket universes of private images, ideas, and judgments.

But cameras do not operate in pocket universes. The lens is necessarily a window outward. It is not quite an antidote for solipsism, but photography creates an opportunity to perceive other people with…not necessarily clarity, but with intensity.

Note: strictly speaking, it is not true to say “cameras do not operate in pocket universes–a lot of studio photography is done inside pocket universes. But a camera in the street and a camera in the studio are practically unrelated tools.