Tarragona
I recently came across an essay arguing that every element of a photograph should be consciously considered before pressing the shutter. Every line, shape, and subject. Despite being obviously impossible, the whole thing had this air of elitism and certainty about it that I find a bit exhausting.
It felt less like advice and more like someone trying to prove how seriously they take themselves.
People like that are why other people are scared to make art.
Anyway, I can’t sleep and I’ve been looking at photos from some of my trips.
Here are three of them:
The context doesn’t matter, but I could analyse these and explain to you why they’re “photography”. For example: the directionality of the street shot, the way the mountain and the church mirror each other’s shape, the way the stairs leading into the fog represents ambiguity, bla bla.
The older I get, the less interested I become in taking photographs as perfect records. Photos are just memories we store in an album, and memories do not work that way.
Memories make some details glow brighter than others, for better or worse, and some disappear completely. Entire days turn into a single mental image and sometimes we have to fight like hell to turn them back into a movie. Memories aren’t particularly reliable either, in fact, they are attached to feelings and associations: a particular song, the shape of a face, the way a word was spoken, or a certain violence committed against us.
So if we’ve already made peace with the fact that memory is unreliable, and we’ve never once considered that a reason to stop remembering, why would we demand perfection from ourselves before we’re allowed to begin?
As for the ‘memories’ pictured above: the mountain had a scale so overwhelming that it briefly made my problems feel ridiculous. The escalator represented something that felt lonely, haunting, and epic. The guy crossing the street seemed to embody a feeling I had associated with Tokyo itself.
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights.
You can be the judge if these photos make you feel something. But the point I’m making is the images were only produced because the scenes made me feel something first and foremost.
You know how Van Gogh painted swirly stars? He painted them like that because something inside him said they should be swirly. When we stand in front of one of his paintings, we do not accuse him of inaccuracy. We know he’s communicating a dreamlike experience, not a measurement.
If I were to give any “advice” it would be this: a photograph is an act of noticing, putting aside any technical actions, photographs are declarations of interest. Basically, they are admissions about what matters to us.
I’ve written before, that’s why we take photos of people we love.
The technical process by which anything is created often tells us nothing about its value. In the case of art, it begins with a feeling, and technique exists in service of communicating whatever it was that we felt.
Good photographs are rarely purely instinctive or purely deliberate. They begin with one and are refined by the other.
The same applies to life.
Here’s a final thought:
In art, literature, friendship, justice, or any healthy endeavour that brings you solace or joy, disregard the judgement of others. Especially from those who would place doubt on your heart, and weigh in on your soul so that theirs may feel a little lighter.
Perfection can wait, someone else will find it in you before you ever find it in yourself.
