A small incident that helped me realize the power of ambiguity

A few weeks back, my boss at Intuit, James helms showed me this blurry overexposed photo of a terrarium he captured on his phone.

My immediate reaction was — “That’s a terrible photo, James!”

I went home that day thinking about everything that went wrong with this photo, based on my understanding of what a good photo should be.

Things like —

• There is no clear focus.
• There is more light than required.
• It wasn’t aesthetically appealing to me.

My idea of a good photo was that it clearly conveys the story… and this one wasn’t simply doing that.

But what if the story you are trying to tell is vague in nature? What if you wanted people to consider multiple perspectives of a story, which often times are not possible with literal storytelling? — Well, in James’ case, what if he wanted to tell the story of condensed water droplets on the glass wall? What if his story was about the abundance of light and its positive impact on the lush greenery? What if it was about the plastic wrapper that protects the whole ecosystem from the outside world?

Did I miss these variety of possibilities and perspectives just by evaluating his creation with my own biases?

I decided to delve into that thought a little more. Since then I’ve been capturing photos that are not picture-perfect as per the ‘set photography standards’, photos that are not always well composed and appealing to your eyes. But the ones that prompt you to think of multiple stories behind a moment — or even provoke you to derive your own stories from them. Photos that are less predictable. Photos that embrace ambiguity.

I just started on this journey and hope to share my learnings here at some point. Until then, you can find instances of them on my Instagram.

I truly appreciate your time reading this and would love to hear your thoughts below.