Why take photographs?

Or at least why do I?

Currently I take two very different sorts of pictures - the ones I feel inspired, even compelled, to take for their own sake and the ones I take to document bits of my daily life for the friends who now live too far away. 

It’s the photos I take because I’m moved in some way that I’m thinking about here.  Something I’ll see amazes or captivates me for any of many reasons: beauty, poignancy, mystery, humor, the unexpected, some reasons I can’t even explain. That’s a moment of heightened experience – I feel alert and excited when I’m connecting with a subject that interests me.  Without a camera I could certainly absorb the experience, and then hold it in my memory or let it float away like everything else that’s ephemeral.  So why the urge to photograph it?  I think because at that moment what I’m seeing is possessing me, and I in turn want to possess it.  There may be some sort of basic instinct in this, like magpies and crows snatching and hoarding bright shiny things.  I confess I’m a hoarder of images.  Lucky for me the digital ones take up so little space.

 

Three friends out for a walk in Oakland.  It turns out those glasses
 really are made for dogs and you can order them online

The camera can stop time, or at least catch a piece of it – I can feel like I have that moment back again whenever I look at the photo.  I love being able to revisit places I’ve been, and I can revisit the self I was when I took the picture.

winding through San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

And of course, I have an impulse to share what I saw with anyone else who might appreciate it as I do.  So it’s a means of connecting with others, in the same way I feel a connection to some photographer or artist I’ll never meet who created an image out of a sensibility similar to mine.

I know some of the things that attract me, and some I’m still in the process of discovering.

Plant and flower forms interest me. 

Certain color combinations.

Extreme close-ups.  I want to go in macro-close sometimes – I like the sense of intimacy it creates, the shift in scale taking me into another world, or as though I could get deeper into the heart of something. 

Outlines and other things that emphasize line; shapes that line up in a serendipitous way.

People.  Well, I’ve got mixed impulses here.  I love seeing other photographers’ images of interesting people, but I feel very awkward about taking them myself, not wanting to intrude or offend.  At an early age I must have been told it’s not polite to stare at people, and what’s an aimed camera but an ultra supreme stare.

Odd, ambiguous or inexplicable signage. 

coming soon to a farmers' market near you



 The daily life documentation photos pretty much take care of themselves. They serve their purpose as long as I give them enough light and reasonably crisp focus,

like this one, to show my friends a couple of the tomatoes I grew in a plastic tub in my side yard – a variety called “Celebrity” – with virtually no seeds and very red flesh throughout.

This has been a good exercise – raising many more questions for me about my relationship to photography than I’ve managed to answer.   The photographs I included in this post were taken with my S70, but I'll soon be doing more with the new camera.