My Use of Photography
I think Photography is amazing.
Like, look at this photo. It’s raw as hell.
Having just purchased an Instax Mini Camera I’ve been taking it out to some of my favorite spaces in the city and shot some things I really enjoy. Honestly, it’s quality isn’t as good as my iPhone but I actually love how different the quality of the photos are, it really shows how different perceptions can be. I felt as if I could have spent the whole day outside, snapping pics and seeing how the camera realized the moment in a different way than I did.
Of course, my glee didn’t get very far before I came up on the question of why? What am I doing this for? I started to ask myself what the use of these photos, other than my personal joy, would or could be.
This massive question of “what for” is unfortunately at the bedrock of every leisurely activity we engage in for long enough. “What is this for”, or “what can this accomplish?” that voice in ours heads asks us. Now, Valuing self-care and decrying productivity are fixtures of the millennial identity so for me at least, it’s getting easier to dispel that question without a second though. It is easy to dismiss, but the more I reflect on it the more I realize there is merit in getting under it and looking at what this question can tell us about photography as a whole.
If photography does have to have a use separate from that of documentation then I think it’s one that can teach us about attention, curiosity, and engagement. So if I do decide to humor the voice in my head and argue that photography’s use is to educate me about these themes, what exactly can photography say about them? what does photography do for my sense of attention? How does it help with curiosity? What responsibility to engagement does photography actually have and allude to?
Now, I know I can’t say what exactly photography does for everyone’s attention, curiosity and sense of engagement but I can say what it’s done for mine, and I can even enlist the help of a few mentors who helped elucidate this understanding for me.
First, I have to assert the belief that photography is indeed an Art form. Although it may arguably be one of the most technical ones, it is also deeply intertwined with the same esoteric themes that most art forms address: Attention, Time, Presence, and Mortality. Although each art form may address and deal with these things in it’s own particular way, they are all still incredibly engaged with them and these can be said to be some of the core foundations of art.
Photography, by sheer virtue of being a visual medium, uses what we already know, can see, and are familiar with, to understand and develop our curiosity. The more things that I photograph the more inclined I am to search for answers and understand what I’m capturing. This is one way of easing and answering that aggressive “Why” that pops up so often. I photograph for beauty, yes, but the beauty is also a form of wonder, and with that wonder I experience a profound sense of curiosity that may or may not lead me to answers.
Curiosity: Having a camera with me during all of my walks and explorations completely radicalizes my sense of perspective and vision. What would usually happen during my walks before I had my camera is I would let whatever catches my attention catch it for a moment, maybe only a passing glance, then I’d continue on my path. With the addition of a camera though, I now spend more time looking at things that catch my attention and use the lens to magnify my preliminary appreciation. It expands it in an interesting way, and gives more room for engagement and contemplation. The initial aggressive Why adopts a new breadth and peace and calls into question what I’m seeing instead of questioning the activity itself. Is that not one of the main aims of art? To see better and to see in a new way? This type of development and reflection leads me into a critical form of attention.
Attention: Merriam-Webster defines Novelty as “Something new or Unusual”, and defines Novel as “ new and not resembling something formerly known or used”, and if you know anything about Charlotte, North Carolina you know that it is ever evolving and celebrating that “something new” that it has or is getting. Often, that something new is simply just some new building and new corporation moving into fill it. For some, that sense of novelty might be all that you see in the city, but for those of us who have been here long enough we know that new developments are actually what remain a constant. What then, is recognized as different or novel under a skyline that continues to grow with more of the same buildings being built?
It feels as if difference and novelty share the same foundational ethic of attention, and what demands my attention the most these days is ironically the “weeds” that crop up in between the cracks and in the spaces that have yet to be renewed. Now, this isn’t to say that these new buildings and these new corporations don’t merit the same level attention as well, they do. It’s just that consistently hearing the same narrative about them over and over gets a bit exhausting and loses it’s appeal. Instead, what catches my attention is what grows without help. It’s the seemingly abundant tenacity of wildflowers growing each spring and summer in spite of the rampant construction crowding out their homes.
Unchecked growth is not always a good thing though. I learned this not too long ago when I was fawning over kudzu and the beauty of it draping over all the trees that flank the highway and city streets. The Kudzu almost mirrored the sense of unchecked growth that it feels developers have adopted with each new apartment complex they put up. I was almost ignorant enough to over-value all of the foliage I see without doing any research as to the habits and truth of the vine that demanded my attention. Attention without considering can quickly devolve into romanticism and a lack of understanding the complexity that exist in all life. A complexity that even the Kudzu illustrated if only I would have looked hard enough. What we need then, is a sense of attention that grows and develops into engagement.
Engagement: For me, what makes photography most captivating and different from other art forms is it’s way of displaying the effects of our choices and actions on the world firsthand. Both through research and sheer curiosity from some photos I’ve taken, I’ve developed some beautiful questions about both the environment and the city that I live in. The capturing of the photo was one thing but the reflection after made me look and work to connect the dots between things I’ve learned and things I’m still learning.
Questions about what makes something an Art and what constitutes the artist responsibility have existed since what feels like the dawn of time. This question is even more prevalent now that we have many people who are both artist and activist. People who use their practice to speak to a more political and democratic narrative. If art and activism has taught anything it has taught us that we need to work beyond the simple binaries that are provided to us in direction to something new entirely. Something beyond the simple idea of good or bad, beyond optimism and pessimism, beyond even black and white.
I look to Eudora Welty, who understood this during her time working as a photographer in the Mississippi Delta with the Works Progress Administration, before she wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning novel the Optimist Daughter. Having been quoted as saying “our knowledge depends upon the living relationship between what we see going on and ourselves”, She realized that the work of the photographer requires not only that moment of capture, but the act of probing the relationship between what one captures and oneself. She goes on to say “If exposure is essential, still more so is the reflection. Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.” In fact an important part of engagement is that sense of reflection and working to understand past the easy assumptions that we’ve been taught to adopt.
It feels as if with the omnipotent importance of social media today, our attention span for images has narrowed to a slim margin that’s even more difficult to expand than years before. This shortening of the attention span causes us to spend less time looking at photos on the endless stream of our feeds, but what I think engagement asks us to do is the opposite. Instead, we need to spend more time on the photos that we see to indeed work past the binaries that we so often categorize images into. Engagement has the beautiful benefit of leading us into connection with those around us and placing us within a community of people working to right some of the wrongs that are so easy to see. These may be social, yes, but they can also be communal, mental, or even environmental. In fact, all of those can be comprised within one photo.
While I may not be using photography to save the world, there are countless others who are, and what it does for me mainly rest on the fact that it ties everything in the world together so accurately and so expressively that if it does have a use it must direct to this. A sense of connection and engagement with both the physical and virtual world around us in a complex and hopeful way. This engagement rest on our ability to stay curious, stay attentive and stay engaged. Photography reminds of this with every picture that I take.
