June 18, 2009
Why do you take pictures?
Rora put his black Canon down in his lap, then under the table. He snapped a picture of the graces’ legs, covering the click with a false cough.
Why did you take that picture?
That’s a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.
Why do you take pictures?
I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.
It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget it.
So what?
So nothing, I shrugged.
They can look at the picture and remind themselves.
But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?
I see the picture, Rora said. What’s with these questions?
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Drink more coffee, Brik, Rora said. It will pick you up.
An excerpt from the book I’m reading, The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon.
This resonated with me. I have an online library of almost 2,500 photos and an offline one of at least half that. I also like to look at the pictures I take, and they often make me wistful. I’m a nostalgic person, much like the narrator of Hemon’s novel. I, too, have thought, What I can see is what I am not.
Why do you take pictures?
comments
Leave a Reply
People Take Pictures of Each Other. (The Kinks. 1968.)
to learn how to see and think.
To embellish.
To document daily life in the rural Philippines!
To be immortal as my pictures will long out live me.
Mike, have you re-established a photographic ‘online presence’ these days?
Aye, that I have….
Plus I have also started a collaborative project.. http://www.anti-lomo.com and I’m working on mgdphotography.com though that’s going to need weeks of work.
I love making little covetable squares of images of how I see things.
I take pictures because it’s faster than writing. In the time it takes for me to pull my journal and pen out of my bag to record the scene before me, I could have jumped off my bike, taken several photos from various points of view, and stepped back on my bike. I compare my photography to journaling because, in many ways, they provide the same service.
I can look back at a photo and remember the sounds or smells of where I was. When I record an event in my journal, I use the same senses. I find writing from the memory in a photo (instead of present experience) to be very telling. My memory is capable of both strengthening and obscuring emotion. I like the way this changes a story.
Usually, so I can post them on Flickr.
No, but, really. I shot a few pictures at the show I went to tonight, mostly because I know that eventually someone out there will be searching for pictures of those musicians, if not of that specific show. I know because I’ve had to do it myself a hundred times.
So, sympathy for the art director who has no licensing budget.
Similarly, I took a few photos of the cake I made right before the show, so that I could post them with a link to the recipe. So anyone who wants to know what happens if you use strawberries in this recipe can see for herself. (The answer: You get a damn tasty cake.)
Between these two occasions, on the way from the subway to the show, I took a photo of a hand-lettered sign on a fence because (a) the text was slightly amusing, and (b) there are all kinds of type geeks out there who will enjoy it.
Most of the few photos I take that are not intended for Flickr are so I can visualize change over time—e.g., how clean my apartment was two weeks ago vs. how messy it is today.
I have no idea why I take pictures – it just started back in the 70s and has continued – it ebbs and flows,but, I continue.
I use the taking as a means of looking, the desire to take them makes me look closer, dwell on things. I take photos of things that please me, generally for no particular reason. I have always loved to wander, taking photos of where I have wandered feels good.
It’s odd, I rarely look back at old ones – I enjoy them when I first see them and when I process them – then of course there is the period when they are current on my blog or Flickr then they slip off of my radar unless I am asked about them or decide to enter them into an exhibition or something, that makes me revisit them.
I don’t generally feel my taking has any purpose – first and foremost they are for me – the ones that please me I show on the off chance others like them as well.
They do sometimes.
I didn’t realize it until you asked the question, but I take pictures to build a visual lasting story of my life and the people, places & things I love and find interesting.
If it weren’t for photos I would have no idea what my father looked like. I first saw a photo of him when I was in high school and although it could be considered a poor substitute for the man I never got to meet, it at least filled a bit of the wondering void in me.
This question made me imagine how much more I might know and understand about him if he had also left a visual story behind. I’d be able to follow the places he went, see what he saw and discover whether we were attracted to similar things.
It would be a cool thing to have, don’t you think?
I do think! That visual story is why I believe so many flockers have taken to audio/video recordings lately.
As I see it, the ‘stock was a megaphone to all the other senses we don’t share when only words are expressed between us.
I hope this weekend to expand on what I meant by to embellish.
Right now I’m . . . embellishing.
it’s odd. I keep reading the post and asking myself why I put images on the web. Not why I take them, that doesn’t matter really. But, why am i showing them? Am I trying to elevate them in my own eyes – by people saying they like them – do I like me more?
Why did I offer to give images away? I’m not questioning your wanting them, but, why did I think you might want them – how would I have felt if no-one had answered.
I have no idea.
Is it possible to just take them and no more – still pondering that, but, I guess if it were only for me then there would be no web site or flickr.
Thinking out loud really.
Those are good questions, Phil. They get below the surface of what people write in their boilerplate ‘artists’ statements’.
You might be interested in Hemon’s site for The Lazarus Project – here.
[...] woubie: I didn’t realize it until you asked the question, but I take pictures to build a visual lasting story of my life and the people, places & things I love and find interesting. [...]
Taking pictures/photographs has not been “my first instinct.” I feel that changing a bit. Watching y’all, especially Deron and Mike at flockstock, makes me yearn to take, to capture, to share. There is something in “having the presence of mind to record” and to record the uncapturable.
Many times, I have seen something and thought, in the moment, “Gosh, I wish I had a camera with me,” (or could get it out fast enough to capture the thing I’d just seen–so many of those images were a moment, speeding past. I was unprepared to capture it. Or maybe I was prepared and did?
I remember Spring last year, sitting in the visitors center on the Mall in DC, sipping a bottle of water, watching people, waiting for Danny who’d gone to the Ladies’ Room. *giggle* A girl of four or five, in a bright sundress and flipflops, skipped through the front doors and across the floor. There was a thrilling exhuberance and energy in her, casting an echoey wake in the cool, cavernous air. She was so excited to be there. Her mother calling after her, “Wait, sweetie, wait!” The girl too full of the moment, for a moment, to listen. She was caught up with. Stilled.
Wish y’all could have seen it. My camera was in my hand, turned off, “saving the battery.” Had I had the foresight, I might have had the camera “on video,” sitting on the table, trained on the door. Had I set the camera on the table at that moment to see what might have followed, I might have captured another something. Or maybe not.
This is why I write what I write sometimes. Some things can only be captured in mind and only shared like this, to be remembered and perhaps embellished. Still, the moment, shared now, might have gone unnoticed, unremembered, unshared, save for sweet Kelsey’s spiky question.
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. – Garry Winogrand
I would say that picture-making builds a symbolic system, a framework for the perception of the world or a meditation on a set of ideas. The linguistic philosopher Nelson Goodman posits that one knows the world only through creation. Learning is the discovery of a pattern, and that discovery is facilitated by the invention and imposition of patterns of one’s own devising. Photographs are subjective patterns formed from direct observation informed by the history of image making, industry, and my own lived experiences. These patterns form models on which we base our perception of the world. When those models change through picture making, so does our world view. However transitory and constructed, photographs for me suggest a glimpse of latent beauty among the chaos we traffic in our daily lives.
[...] Barry Stone: I would say that picture-making builds a symbolic system, a framework for the perception of the world or a meditation on a set of ideas. The linguistic philosopher Nelson Goodman posits that one knows the world only through creation. Learning is the discovery of a pattern, and that discovery is facilitated by the invention and imposition of patterns of one’s own devising. Photographs are subjective patterns formed from direct observation informed by the history of image making, industry, and my own lived experiences. These patterns form models on which we base our perception of the world. When those models change through picture making, so does our world view. However transitory and constructed, photographs for me suggest a glimpse of latent beauty among the chaos we traffic in our daily lives. [...]
Y’all are a lot more complex than I am. One reason I take photos is so that people who are not where I am (or with whom I’m with) can see where I am and whom I’m with (i.e. the travel log when I was in Malta and England). Another reason is to revisit the past: the nostalgia that Kelsey speaks of; the visual record that wouble speaks of. Another is the hope that the image I capture will be, or can be made to be, an objet d’art. I like objets d’art. A related question would be why I draw, or to be more specific (and perhaps to address something which puzzles some of you) why I draw so many versions of my ‘self’. The easy part of that is that I can’t afford models, so I make myself the model. A slightly more complicated response is that I enjoy making myself the object of humor. A response more closely linked to wouble’s would be that I am making a kind of record of this body I live, because it won’t be here very long and I have enjoyed it.