It’s always been my intention to work more with photography although I wouldn’t currently call myself a photographer as such. Over the past few years, for one reason or another, the subject matter has been restricted to more or less the woodland area around where I live in south west London. That said, I’m wondering if the location matters. What it is exactly that I’m trying to capture when I stop to take a photo? Recently, I’ve been asking myself that question quite a bit.
Photography, a word coined by Sir John Herschel back in 1839, means ‘drawing with light’. From the Greek photos meaning light and graphos meaning drawing or writing. I find early photography fascinating and should take time to discover more about it.
Thinking about aspects of what I’ve been capturing, or trying to at least, in my own photographs, I noticed that they mostly relate to fleeting moments in time. A sunset or sunrise. A glimmer of light through the trees or on the water. Reflections. A glisk. Cloud formations changing and moving overhead. The seasons and the wheel of the year. That which we would miss if we were not paying attention, whose form will change and never emerge quite the same way again. A few seconds of an almost mystical presence amidst the turmoil and thoughts of the day. The sun going down on the trees. The stillness and energy of a place. Things present but unseen. Reconnection. A form of psychogeography, I suppose. The light behind the shadow. Since most of these images started to emerge during the covid lockdowns, perhaps I was focussing on bringing a message of hope, too.
At times I feel that stopping to take a photograph can be a distraction. That somehow it is detracting from the experience of what is happening before me. Why am I taking the photograph? Because I find the subject interesting? Is there is something which I want to record or a moment I do not want to miss? Or more worryingly, to satisfy a social media feed? Often, taking the photograph and seeing something through a lens can detract from the connection to what we are photographing. Especially, for me, if animals are involved, finding that those moments of connection with a wild animal can be lost if I’m busy worrying about taking a good enough shot. Nature does not wait. The fox will run. The bird will fly. The sun will go down. The light will change, and the clouds will pass over. I mentioned above that I wondered if the location mattered, and of course it does. Each place has it’s own unique energy. Traces of it’s own history that it is waiting to tell remain for us to tune into and discover.
We really are bombarded with images now. Fed them constantly. Still and moving. It can feel like overload . Image congestion. There seems to be a never ending need to record absolutely everything and never has it been so easy to do so. This reminded me of what Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography back in what I think was the late 1970s about ‘mental pollution’.
‘Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photography is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution…….It would be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists to end in a book. Today, everything exists to end in a photograph. Susan Sontag, On Photography, P18 – 19. Penguin Classics.
The above was written in the Seventies. What would she say now?
I heard Susan Sontag lecture on photography in Edinburgh, a year or so before she died, and also heard her talk about her then new publication ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ at the Book Festival. I met her briefly afterwards. No doubt, if the meeting had taken place today, there would be a selfie to mark the occasion. Or would there? I don’t like them much and probably would never have asked. Personally, I’m not that keen on the idea of expecting someone who I admire but do not know to appear in a photograph with me as if they were my best friend. I suspect that she might not have liked the idea of them either but who knows. As for ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, as I type, on 11th October 2023, the conflict in Israel is escalating and the media are giving us a minute by minute account of what is happening. Perhaps it is now time to read that publication once more.
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