Why Do We Take Photos in the First Place?
The privileged image & the photographic impulse
What draws us to take photos in the first place? The answer probably comes without much thought: To preserve a memory, to prove that something incredible really did happen, to show your friends what you’re up to. When I check my phone for my most recent photographs I see photos of shopping lists, my dog looking stupid, a sewing machine I wanted to show my wife.
“The ubiquity of photography as a form of note-taking – as it is often experienced via our phones today – means that images may often be seen, but perhaps not really looked at and thought about. Our familiarity with photographs, as a form, makes them approachable, but that familiarity is what often frustrates critical thinking and analytical reflection.” Hedy Van Erp and Susan Bright, Photography Decoded
As a professional photographer, the question ‘why do I take photos?’ is more difficult for me to answer: creating photos day in and out as labour has made me more reluctant to memorialise with photography, and I rarely find myself bringing a camera with me on a day off. Understanding the artifice and construction of images can make it hard to remain uncritical of the mythologised power and magic of photography.
The Privileged Image
Susan Sontag is one of the most compelling and influential thinkers I have encountered on the privileged position of photography, in her essay In Plato’s Cave from her 1977 collection On Photography she approaches both the anxieties which draw us out of a moment and towards the camera, and also the privileged position of photography as a representation of reality. By piercing through the photograph’s privilege as a token of reality she can begin to assess the subconscious, or at times consciously ignored reality of the act of photography.
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it- by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel…
…Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” Susan Sontag, On Photography.
New experiences and life in general can be overwhelming. Photography is a technique which can take us out of a moment – preserving it for later enjoyment all the while maintaining a facade of active participation. Sontag’s bluntness is enough to put people off, and when I first read On Photography at university the essays felt cynical and pessimistic. Rereading it now, a decade into my career I find my images often use artifice in order to feel more intuitively real to the viewer, and this contradiction seems well understood in Sontag’s writing. She goes on to claim that a photograph is not more real a claim than a written description of the same event, in spite of the image’s privileged position as an objective truth:
“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as painting and drawings are.” Susan Sontag, On Photography.
Consider the following excerpt from Alec Soth’s book Sleeping on the Mississippi:
“Lenny, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Lenny is a construction worker. During the long Minnesota winters he moonlights as an erotic masseur. Lenny’s teenage son had recently died in a car accident. “My dream,” he wrote, “is to live to be 100 and still look the way I do now.”
It may seem intuitively obvious that little of the above information is available in Soth’s image of Lenny (Which I have linked in a footnote at the end of this article.), but our intuitive scepticism of written language often doesn’t extend to photography, which can be faked, but often feels like a mirror of reality far and above other mediums. The whiplash of Lenny’s disclosure about his son’s death to his vanity-steeped dream seems externally constructed in a way the image’s similar juxtapositions don’t.
The privileged image gives us a hint as to why the camera is king in the preservation and recollection of memories. Why an image certifies your presence at a fancy dinner, a concert, a night out with friends, in a way which description alone simply can’t.
“The relationship between photography and memory is more muddled than one may at first think… Do we really remember an event that happened, or do we remember the photograph of it? The majority of our snapshots are taken around happy events such as holidays, birthdays, weddings and parties. Arguments, divorce proceedings, deaths and funerals – these are rarely photographed. Snapshots record and resurrect only a select version of the past. Moreover, family photographs when printed become powerful talismans for the past: they are handed about, viewed and touched, often as part of a warm, shared experience in which stories” Photography Decoded, Susan bright & Hedy Van Eep
These suggestions- that photography is a facsimile of the real which we use to entertain ourselves and to avoid the anxiety of dealing with real life and interactions- can appear harsh and pessimistic. But by breaking down the mythology surrounding imagery and its capture we can begin to make photography work for us. Either as memory keeper, or for artistic expression.
Eros and Imagery
In the process of writing this article I was fortunate to have my own relationship with photography challenged and reestablished. The impulse to write this article came when reading Sontag’s compelling but critical takes on photography while travelling with a camera (something I rarely do) for my honeymoon. From this interesting bind, I started looking for ways to reconcile the dissonance. To find ways to take photographs without taking myself out of the moment that I would necessarily miss while trying to photograph it.
That a photograph can no better describe a scene than a prose description does not mean that we should be discouraged from creating either. When we relate to photography the same way we would say, a diary entry, we can free ourselves to take on a more spirited and less anxious mode.
“The lost paradises are the only true ones not because, in retrospect, the past joy seems more beautiful than it really was, but because remembrance alone provides the joy without the anxiety over its passing and thus gives it an otherwise impossible duration. Time loses its power when remembrance redeems the past.” Eros and Civilisation, Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse was not writing about photography (and while there is an interesting throughline between the freedom from commodity fetishism and constant capitalistic growth to the photographic impulse is an interesting one, it is outside of the scope of this article) however his words ring true when speaking to the power of memory to give us the joy of the past without the anxiety of knowledge that a moment will soon end. This more optimistic rephrasing suggests a possibility where we allow ourselves to be fully engaged in our lives, and use photography the same way we would use a journal.
While photography can become a completely passive act, a reassurance, or a twitch, the artistic impulse is none of these things. Decoupling our need artistic expression from the impulse to photograph can free us up to create better art and to properly engage with the world without resorting to photography as an easy way to step out of the moment. The same way that it would feel a little ridiculous (though not necessarily totally out of the question) to start painting your experience in the middle of a busy bar- a proper time should be carved out for photography, if only so that the rest of your time can be earmarked for experience. Dan Winters closes out his fantastic book Road to Seeing with a quote which I believe sums up both the artistic power of photography, and the spiritual freedom we gain when we do not allow the hoarding of photographs to take power over us.
“I now find peace in the realization that countless potential masterpieces happen each moment the world over and go unphotographed. The world owes a great debt to all those who have, from a state of exceptional awareness, preserved stillness for us to hold.” Dan Winters, Road to Seeing
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