Photography as extended seeing

I have loved photography since childhood.  My father loved it too, and spent some of his life in dark rooms, shaping black and white photos so that they developed as he wanted.  My first cameras were analogue, a question of winding film onto a spool, and then either sending the film away, or processing the chemical reaction myself.  Later, I bought a small digital camera, and then gradually bought more capable ones, with better focusing ability, and more detailed pictures.  All the way through, it has been an adventure.

THE ART OF SEEING

When I think of what photography is to me, I think of the art of seeing. When I go out to take photographs, I immerse myself in my surroundings, searching for suitable and interesting scenes.  I watch where the light is coming from, where it is going, and how the objects are arranged in between.  I think about where I am in relation to everything.  Am I high or low, close-to or far away?  Do I want to see widely or narrowly?

EXTENDING THE SENSES

Everything I do tries to develop, more deeply, something humans do already.  We walk, talk, think, love, hear, see…  For me, sport and travel are extended movement; poetry and writing are extended talking;  philosophy is extended thinking; relationships and therapy are extended loving; music is extended hearing; and photography is extended seeing.  Art and culture take what we do every day, and develop it, so that it becomes so much deeper, and invades our whole identity and existence.

THE CHALLENGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

When I have a camera in my hand, I have agreed to participate in a big problem, and I rise to the challenge.  The problem is, how to catch everything around me, through a little lens, into a carefully arranged rectangle of colour and form, so that it speaks to me and everyone who sees it.  It is a question of seeing things in a very close and selective way, with a passion for what may result if the light, space and angles are synchronised in a controlled moment.  The photographer is, I guess, a bit of a control freak.  But they are also an opportunist.  Beauty can come from good fortune as well as studios.

SHOWING AND ARCHIVING

I don’t really do much with my pictures.  It is enough to have enjoyed the search.  I have archived them by calendar, and tried to label the folders by location, event, person.  But I have never really solved the problem of what is to be done with photos.  It is as if everything that gets created ultimately goes the same way, and we have to let it slip through our controlling fingers, and be lost.  Just as cliffs erode to sand, so, eventually, collections atomise, and are lost to some future desert.

USES

Sometimes there is a use to photographs.  They can be employed to recall history, to position identities in the present, to explore in a more abstracted way the physics of light, colour, focus, perspective, position, speed, movement.  And, with my interest in psychology, I get interested in how we see, why we like views, what we find beautiful and why, how our attention can be guided by selections that photographers make.

THE FUTURE

As time goes on, I wonder more and more about the general issues around photography.  What will happen to all the collected photographs around the world, in mobile phones and computers?  What does it mean to take one photograph, in a world where billions are proliferating?  How do we select what to keep, what to show, what to lose?  How do we stay tidy and orderly, when our psyche fears loss, and tries to hang on to everything (just in case…), and resists throwing stuff away?

I can’t answer most of these questions.  Life seems to me, in this regard, an uneasy compromise between observation and preservation.  The London museums do it well, selecting and preserving images for us.  But, even then, the selections are biased, and we must retain an ability to see, critically, what we are being persuaded of.  We must stay impartial, stay independent, stay authentic.