Why photography?

I

irbridge

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So why do you shoot? Hope it's not too intrusive a question... but going beyond all the gear talk, what is it that photography does for you?

Just curious to hear what RFF users have to say...

[to the moderator: please feel free to delete if too off-topic :eek:]
 
i think it was gary winogrand that said...i shoot to see what things look like photographed...i'm starting to understand that more & more.
 
What does photography does? Mainly 2 thinks:

a) Relax me. I truly enjoy the photography process, from calculating exposure to printing.

b) Creates memories for me. I'm not an artist myself so most of my photography is related to things I want to preserve.


Most of the time the two mix together and sometimes don't. Sometimes I create memories with digital, skipping all the analog process. Sometimes I take photos just to test equipment and for the sake of it, without creating any memories.

All in all, my photography main function is to add some fun to my life.

Best regards

Marcelo
 
Amazing, just saw that gary winogrand later work adds up to roughly 12,000 rolls (2500 rolls shot but undeveloped, 6500 rolls developed but unproofed, 3000 proofed). These numbers are from wikipedia so grain of salt, but that averages to more than a roll a day across a career of roughly 30 yrs. That's a lot of film...

If photography's your job, then I guess one reason you shoot is you have to... but especially for the serious hobbyists/semi-professional photographers here who invest a lot of time and effort (not too mention money, esp. for the leica crowd), there must be something compelling in it, no? Even if it's just the visceral sound/feeling of pressing a shutter?

In a ways, I guess I'm trying to wrap my head around why I like photography so much, myself. To grow as a photographer, does it have to have meaning? I've noticed, for example, that Michael Kenna looks for a lot peace and harmony in his photos. Don McCullin seems to be driven to conflict, suffering, and war--to the point where he mentions it really taking a toll on family life. Michael Somoroff might have been born into it, but seemed to really have a fascination with it from early on... though in Somoroff's case, I don't recall why.

On the note of Somoroff, since I've already gone and posted a strange question on the forum, I might as well contribute something by sharing one of my favourite portraits from Somoroff, taken of Brassai (his book A Moment. Master Photographers: Portraits by Michael Somoroff is highly recommended. the printed version):

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1. Photography allows me to pursue being a visual artist without needing mucho studio space. Know that at one time I was a painter, and moving around a painting studio in NYC was painful and not practical.

2. I never purposely intended on becoming a gentryfier and somehow got swept into this urban process for decades. Presently at the age of sixty I worry that one day I will have to leave and will permanently be forced out of NYC. My photography is so I can maintain a sense of home and have some form of permanence to take with me.

3. I think being involved in the arts my whole life gave me meaning and purpose, otherwise I likely would be dead by now. Life does not make sense without art.

Cal
 
Interesting, thank you Marcelo (sorry, I saw your response only after drafting the above post!)

Relaxation and memories sound like good reasons. Indeed, sometimes a camera seems to be the best way to turn the brain off and relax...
 
I'm no good on paintings, renovations, gardening, fishing is too expensive and not always possible. I do no fix old cars and bikes, I'm not into knotting. I'm not into cooking and carpentry. I'm not collecting stamp and not gluing nazis planes and tanks models.
I'm not capable of running my own business and live at and for work.

Now you know why I like to take and print pictures. Simply because it is something I cloud to with more, less success.
 
I am a retired mathematician (still doing research though), but ever since I was a boy I have been an art lover and never ceased to study art history.
But I also needed to give my love for Art a creative outlet. I made my first photographs at 8. I also attempted painting, but soon realized I had not enough time to learn to master the technique.
So I turned to movie and photo and kept taking pictures for all the rest of my life
I do so moved by an intimate passion, by my visual greediness and fantasy, by my love for art.
Thus I don't mind exhibiting anything, although some work of mine is hanged at home, and I am working at a photo book and a movie, which I believe will never finish, given I am 73 and sick.
My images evolved and sometimes they are created using multiple photos rather than being simple photographs
Of course I am an hobbyist. But I like to think that my approach and commitment to anything I do is the same, the only difference being I had a salary for my job and kept spending money form my dilectantish Art activity:)
 
Pistach, as a former natural scientist who converted to the humanities, I think I can understand to an extent what you mean by needing a creative outlet (though maths, judging from mathematician friends, seems closer to art than most). I hope you find completion in the photo book and movie, and wishing you better health for doing it.

Calzone, my previous response in an edit seems to have been lost. The idea of photography for maintaining a sense of home quite struck me. I've also found myself reaching for the camera when feeling lost/disoriented. It's interesting food for thought.

Haha, and thank you for a refreshingly pragmatic answer Ko.Fe. (and thank you for your many posts, I've read a lot of them on rff. I also liked your pictures from the thread on your mother's present, and hope the repaired M-E is treating you well)
 
I get a kick out of making prints for people I know. And also, like a surfer looking for the perfect wave; I'm looking for the perfect photo. (I've never done it though.)
 
irbridge said:
Calzone, my previous response in an edit seems to have been lost. The idea of photography for maintaining a sense of home quite struck me. I've also found myself reaching for the camera when feeling lost/disoriented. It's interesting food for thought.
Click to expand...

In the 1960 census there were less than 238K Asians in the U.S., and during the Vietnam War I grew up looking like the enemy. I moved around a lot and was known by my friends as a drifter.

Somehow the drifting never stopped and in a way never really had a "home," a place where I belonged, and you are correct in that I do have very strong feelings of being lost and disoriented.

I forgot to mention that photography offers me the opportunity to impose control when many things in life one cannot control. I find this redeeming and peaceful because I can create a universe that is my own. It seems photography offers me the permanence that is missing in my life.

Cal
 
I became interested in cameras because I had a telescope (a cheap and not-good, one) and when I used it to look at planets, the moon and stars, I thought "Is that it? Is that all I get to do:look?" There was something missing. I decided that the missing thing was 'practical', there was nothing practical I could do. I don't quite know how it occurred to me, but I began to wonder if there was a way I could take photos of what I was looking at. I presume it's because I saw photos like that in books. So I started looking in mail order catalogues for cameras with speeds as slow as 1 second and 'B'. I had no idea where to get any adapters though, so I suppose that scuppered the plan.

Having picked up the idea that slow speeds were good for astrophotography, either from astronomy books or photo magazines, i began to take notice of the different types and levels of cameras and lenses, and also what they were used for.

I veered from an interest in one type of subject to another, such as macrophotography and sport etc. My interest also veered from camera to camera, starting off with multi-mode ones to shutter priority ones to manual ones. After a run-off between a Pentax MX an olympus OM1 and Nikon FM, I settled on wanting an FM because of its metal shutter, higher flash-sync speed and info in the viewfinder.

I had no chance of getting one though as I had little money.

Anyway, I suppose I finally got around to actually doing it and paying to have the film processed and printed as it's 'practical', a thing I can 'do' (not as in 'something I'm good at', I'm not) and 'images' that at least try to say something appeal to me. I think this latter reason is why silent films also appeal to me.
 
I'm gonna just cop to a short answer. Photography massages my ego, feeds a desire to be creative and gives me a joyous sense of accomplishment at those moments when everything goes well.

There are other reasons but, really, those are enough.
 
Why not? :)

Photography is stopping the time and keep the moment conserved.
There is soo much to discover in every moment.
Some are worth, others not so and some are missed.
 
the sins of my father...

Growing up my bedroom was previously my dad's darkroom which he moved to an ever expanding garage behind the house as his business grew. As a pre-teen I would accompany my dad on photo shoots and as a teenager I spent many happy hours in the dark... sometimes I take different photos than my dad, but some 60 odd years later I never lost the love for the process... 'baseball has been very good to me...'
 
No idea. I've been working seriously with a camera since 1982, started making snapshots in 1969 when my grandfather gave me an old Brownie Hawkeye that had been my mothers. I too began as a painter, but found that as I was making photographs as reference for paintings I really loved the process of being in the darkroom more than the painting.

Photography gave me a good living for a long while, and even if it does not anymore I am still lugging a camera with me pretty much everywhere I go, and making pictures pretty much every day. I kinda need to do it, like some compulsion.

I've been going back through my B&W negative books, (76 binders worth) and revisiting negatives I never got printed as I wanted to. Wonderful fun. I'm in the darkroom most mornings, then have the afternoons for the maintenance of the apartment buildings I manage now. But always with the camera. It just became part of my daily existence back about thirty years ago and hasn't left.
 
I needed something artsy and cheap to cover the nail holes in the walls. Looks a lot better than the newsprint that was there, but not everyone agrees on that.....everyone's a critic these days!
 
I use photography to say something about us and our world - I create “visual essays”, I guess. I aim to exhibit my finished photographic projects in galleries - my images are simply a means of communication, so if people don’t see them, they lose their purpose.

When I started photography about a dozen years ago I simply took photos of things that caught my eye - landscapes, sunsets, people, animals, plants ... anything at all that made me look. After a couple of years I started to get bored. What was the point of my photos? What do I do with them? How many sunset photos do I really need?!

In fact, I almost gave up photography as a pointless pastime.

But then I got talking to an artist, and she saw something in my photos and persuaded me that I was going about photography all wrong. She told me to photograph ideas, not things. And she persuaded me to apply for an MA Photography degree - she said it would make all the difference. It did. (As an aside, the UK government subsidises degrees, so the MA cost only £4000 ($6000) - worth every penny!)

The way I work now is that something catches my attention. Usually not visual but a thought or fact - perhaps something I’ve read or heard. I may then photograph my thoughts.

An example is my “Insecta” project. I was looking at a collection of pinned butterflies and moths in a junk shop, all rather tattered and faded, the labels faded to illegibility, and I wondered about its history - that someone long ago dedicated their life to these insects, but their collection was now meaningless. Not only had it lost all the information it once had, even the person who created it had been forgotten.

So, I decided to photograph my pondering: that we try to organise the world around us - for example in natural history collections - but this is doomed to failure.

I spent several months researching - reading, writing, visiting museums... Eventually I decided how to do this photographically. It would be a still life project of about 100 photos, of old collections I found myself plus collections in the Booth Museum of Natural History - which kindly allowed me to explore their private store rooms. The end result would be gallery prints and an artist’s book.

The project statement that I worked to is:

The urge for humans to collect and classify is instinctual – a need to arrange the world around us into patterns, to form order from chaos. But time dissipates that which has been carefully hoarded; and it is this failure that fascinates me.

Dust and disintegration are the hallmarks of the fragments of insect collections depicted in my project “Insecta”. These creatures have died twice, first poisoned in killing jars, then turned by time into ruins. What remains are cul-de-sacs: their stored knowledge dissipated, their context lost.​

Below is one of the 100 or so images, and also an installation shot in a gallery (the book is on the stand, and I created a sculpture too - a “cabinet of curiosities”).

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