wp3: intellectual autobiography
how I engage with the world through photography
Photography has been a part of my life for so long that it has become a critical part of who I am. Over the years, photography gradually shifted from just a casual hobby to my way of seeing and understanding the world, making me more active and more appreciative of my life. I have spent a lot of time in the past thinking about what I enjoy about photography, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about why it is meaningful to me on a deeper level. This paper is a chance for me to investigate how engaging with the world through photography has changed and defined who I am.
So far in my photography “career” I experienced the greatest growth in the three years I photographed for yearbook in high school. I wrote about this in both my WP2 and WP1 respectively: “I shot tens of thousands of photographs in nearly every situation imaginable.” Every time I approached a new type of photography, ”I would study multiple YouTube videos to learn how professionals shoot the same event. I went into every event with a list of ‘dream photos’ that I would hope to capture, and a game plan to shoot the event just as a professional would.” (Ding). This learning technique, however, was not what actually led to my growth.
At the time I was exhilarated when I successfully replicated the work of professional photographers, but this approach was inherently problematic because the core of my work wasn’t my own. I approached photography as if it were a pure technical skill, in which if I could replicate the pros, I would be a pro myself. This ignores the fact that photography is ultimately an art and a form of self expression. Because I shot those photos according to my “plan,” limited by the expectations I had going in, I wasn’t truly engaging with the people, the action, and the space I was photographing. Those photos weren’t really me making a photo, but me imitating what I considered “good photography” to become a “good photographer”. In the way I was learning photography, I was being what Wendell Berry describes as the “tourist photographer.”
In “The Unforeseen Wilderness,” Wendell Berry writes about the “tourist-photographer” being the opposite of a “good photographer”. What’s dangerous isn’t shooting “tourist-y” photos that have already been shot a thousand times before. What’s dangerous is approaching photography without an open mindset. Without an open mindset, a photographer is “not likely to see anything that will surprise or delight or frighten him, or change his sense of things.” (Traub, 126). In other words, to make photographs only with preexisting assumptions is to miss the opportunity to learn and grow. I don’t regret learning by copying work I admired, because this is often a part of the creative process and understanding my own creativity, but I wasn’t able to truly grow as a photographer until I adopted a more open mindset: to welcome surprises and accidents, to observe and be present in the moment, to make good photographs of my own. Opening my mind and learning how to translate my unique engagement with the world into images taught me to build my visual language, and grow as an artist.
In her piece, “In Plato’s Cave,” Susan Sontag writes that the “insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of the confinement in the cave, our world.” She is referring to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners are trapped in a cave and their perceptions of reality are based entirely on shadows they see on the cave walls, but to them, ignorance is bliss (3). Just as how she argues that photography is a way of escaping the cave, I see photography as a way of learning more about the world. Because there will always be more for me to experience and discover, there will always be more for me to learn about the world through photography.
Because photography became a way for me to learn about the world, I have become a more active participant in my own life. But there is an argument that photography actually detracts from truly experiencing a moment or a scene, because somehow, if I’m doing the act of photographing, I’m not doing the act of participating. Or that by photographing, I am reducing an experience to a mere “search for the photogenic” (Sontag, 9). To me this argument is utter nonsense, because what I choose to photograph is in fact the exact thing I am most engaged with. What I photograph and what I engage with are one and the same.
First I would like to refute the first point, that it’s not possible to participate while photographing. I have had enough practice with my camera such that the technical parts involved in creating an image (such as setting exposure and white balance) have become so instinctual that they do not interfere with my ability to participate in moments I photograph. Instead, it is the other part of creating an image (determining what to shoot, how to compose it, when to press the shutter) that actually leads me to become more active in the moments I photograph. By putting my own perspective into the images I create, I am being an anti-tourist-photographer, both exploring and discovering the world around me. Having a camera on me encourages me to put more effort into observing my surroundings and into engaging with my daily life, so instead of photography interfering with my ability to participate, I participate by photographing.
Photography is not merely a “search for the photogenic” because a strong photograph is not necessarily “photogenic”, it’s beautiful. My intense focus, participation, and engagement with a moment are required in this search of what’s beautiful, whether it be the beauty in the emotion behind an expression, the beauty in the interaction between two people, the beauty in the change in a landscape, or even the beauty in sadness, which I think comes from the realization of how much someone really cared about something. This search for beauty is far beyond a search for the photogenic because it requires me to empathize and see a little bit of myself in what I photograph, and this makes photography deeply meaningful to myself.
I wrote in my WP2 that one of the first things that drew me to photography was how it encouraged me to find beauty in the world (Ding). This started as something simple, something that made photography fun for me, but it became the reason why photography became such an important part of my life. The way I use my camera is similar to how Wendell Berry believes a photographer should approach image making, which is to use a camera as “an instrument of perception or discovery” and to photograph as an “[endless] spiritual quest” (Traub, 126-127). This “quest” for me is to discover and cherish the beautiful moments in my life. I’ve come to realize that, when I discover something beautiful, when something urges me to photograph it, I get the same feeling as falling in love. Albeit on a smaller scale, it literally feels identical. So in a way, photography to me is an act of love: I momentarily fall in love with something, make an image out of what I feel, and move on. It probably sounds ridiculous, so let me explain with a few examples.
One morning while going on a walk in my neighborhood in an effort to get out of the house during quarantine, I brought my phone with me as a simple camera. In the past ten years of living in this neighborhood in Virginia, I have walked and biked around the neighborhood thousands of times, but just knowing I had a camera on me led me to visually engage with my surroundings, and to love and find beauty in what had become mundane. I loved the green leaves showing hints of yellow because it shows how my neighborhood changes with the seasons. I loved the kiddy bikes left out on the sidewalk and the playground sets in backyards because it shows how safe my neighborhood is. Every time I saw something like this that compelled me to take a photograph, it felt like I had momentarily fallen in love with a little part of my neighborhood. These photos will remain special to me as I eventually move across the country to LA for school and for my film career, because I will be able to look back on these photos and be grateful for being able to spend half my life growing up in such a beautiful place.
A few weeks ago I was driving down Interstate 495 with my sister very early on an extremely foggy morning. I couldn’t stop being in awe of how the fog transformed the scenes I’ve seen a million times into something mystical and beautiful. The landscapes I engaged with most on an emotional level were the ones I photographed. Maybe I found it beautiful that, despite the fog almost completely obscuring certain buildings, trees, and other roadmarks, we still knew they were there. Maybe I was a little melancholic that in a few years time when I’ve been away from home for long enough, my memory of that stretch of highway will become just like it was on that day: foggy, but still beautiful. Perhaps most importantly, preserved in every photograph is the experience of sharing a morning drive with my sister.
I resonated deeply with a YouTube video I watched recently by Matt Day, titled: “DOCUMENT YOUR LIFE | staying PRESENT with your camera.” Matt suggests two key steps to staying present with a camera: integrating photography into daily life and mastering the technical aspects. Having already accomplished both of these steps I can observe life in a photographic manner and capture my observations instinctually and to be more active in every moment. Matt Day says being “hyper-sensitive” and absorbing the tiniest details “like a sponge” allow him to to understand a moment, anticipate what’s going to happen, and capture that moment, and through this, better understanding and remembering moments in his life. This mindset has become so ingrained in me that it has become how I observe the world even when I don’t have a camera on me. It is this constant search for what I think is beautiful, and “falling in love” with so many little moments in life that give me a greater appreciation for my life as a whole.
Because the photos I make have a profound effect on my appreciation of the world, I try to revisit photos as often as possible. I think I often spend too much time living in the future, always worrying about what’s coming next. Photography brings me a greater appreciation of the past, which helps me think about what has shaped who I am and how I have changed as a person over time. I revisit old photos by using my photos as a form of record-keeping, or what Susan Sontag describes in “On Photography” as a “record of change.” (1). I often attach photos to my digital journal entries as a way for me to look back in the future to remember the value of an important moment in the past. As a result, I think it’s important for me to analyze how my creative choices reflect my engagement with a moment, because how I choose to engage with my present reality affects how, in the future, I will see my past.
Earlier I described the process of seeing myself in the photos I make, and thereby embedding a part of myself in my photos. This is part of the “equivalence” process that Minor White describes in “Equivalence: The Perennial Trend.” During the equivalence process, a photograph “functions as a mirror” for the viewer of a photograph (18). “Projection and empathy, natural attributes in man, lead us to see something of ourselves almost automatically in anything that we look at long enough.” (20). Equivalence is typically a “two-way interaction” between the photographer and the viewer, where the photographer will project a part of themselves into the image, and the viewer will empathize with that (18). For the photos I take for myself, I am both the photographer and the viewer, and I can use this effect on myself, using photos as a two-way interaction between my present self and my future self. Even if what I photograph is not “objectively true to life”, ingrained in every photograph is the creative choices that define my own subjective reality.
Post-processing plays a big role in the feeling I project into my images. The several phases of editing styles I have been through each reflect a significant period in my life.
One of the phases is what I think of as the “candy” phase, when I tried very hard to bring out as much color as I could in my photographs. I think these colorful and punchy edits reflected an innocently positive outlook on life.
The “candy” phase was followed by the “faded” phase, when I preferred an extremely elevated black point and lowered contrast and saturation, almost the exact opposite look to the “candy” phase. This happened during my junior year of high school when I averaged 3–4 hours of sleep per night, and life was literally hazy and faded because of how extremely sleep deprived I was.
More recently, I have been working on developing a look that’s more “filmic” and “painterly”, partly the reasons for which I wrote about in my first blog post for this class (Ding), and partly because I love how the softer look of low contrast and pastel colors reflect my happier and more relaxed outlook on life.
Aside from the overall look of my post-processing across thousands of images reflecting phases in my life, the choices I make for each individual photograph also impact what I project into an image. The following are just a few examples:
I shot this photo intentionally framing the bright snow between the dark sky and the dark asphalt, knowing I would edit it in black and white, because I didn’t care about the yellow/green tinge of the street lamps, I didn’t care about the red in the bricks on the building, I didn’t care about the green in the sign (frame right). I just cared about how beautiful my college campus looked when everything was covered in a thick white layer of snow.
I shot this photo using a 6-stop ND filter to slow the shutter speed down to 20 seconds, which made the moving water look almost completely still and created a more tranquil mood, which reflected how I felt watching the sunset after completing a hike with my friends.
When photographing dance events at college, I used a combination of on-camera flash and dragging the shutter speed to freeze the subjects while embedding a sense of motion, excitement, and slight removal from reality.
What I choose to photograph is a manifestation of what I find important in life and what deserves to be remembered, so the way I interact with the world through my camera shapes my reality.
In writing this paper, I learned a lot about myself. I have always known why I find making images for other people to be fulfilling and I have written about it before (in my WP1), but I never understood why taking photos just for myself has been so fulfilling until now. I learned that it’s because photography helps me love life. I’ve realized that when I find something that I want to photograph, there are deeper subconscious motivations that I haven’t been previously aware of, and the emotions I experience when taking a photograph are more significant than I’ve previously given them credit for. In questioning what I find beautiful, I finally found an answer to a question I’ve been wondering for a long time, which is why I find beauty in sadness. I’ve realized how important it is for me to have a camera on me at ALL times because so many of the most meaningful photos I’ve taken have been shot on my phone because it was the only camera on me. (Maybe this is enough reason to convince myself to pull the trigger on that compact film camera I’ve been eying for months…) Most importantly, I’ve learned how much photography is at the core of my identity. I previously only saw it as a key part of my identity because it’s “what I do”, but I now understand it as a core part of my identity because it has transformed how I engage with the world and the people in my life; it is literally a part of how I function and therefore who I am. Photography has changed my life, and will continue to do so until the day I die.
References
Day, M. (2020, September 14). DOCUMENT YOUR LIFE | staying PRESENT with your camera [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSjkBZkEilE
Ding, F. (2020, September 7). 16mm film emulation. Medium. https://medium.com/@frankdin/writ-150-post-1-16mm-film-emulation-2ff91f09e630
Ding, F. (2020, October 11). Wp1: How my camera gave my life purpose. Medium. https://medium.com/writing-150-fall-2020/how-my-camera-gave-my-life-purpose-58f027aa087b
Ding, F. (2020, October 12). Wp2: Photographic intellectual archive. Medium. https://medium.com/writing-150-fall-2020/wp2-photographic-intellectual-archive-e072de72519a
Sontag, S. (1977). In Plato’s Cave. In On photography (pp. 3–24). Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Sontag, S. (1977). On photography (the short course). In On photography. Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Traub, C., Heller, S., & Bell, A. (2010). Writers on Photography. In The education of a photographer (pp. 126–129). Simon & Schuster.
White, M. (1963). Equivalence: The Perennial Trend. PSA Journal, 29(7), 17–21.
