This postDuring breakfast today I watched Jehane Noujaim’s presentation at TED. The first half, actually; I’ll watch the rest of it after I finish writing this post. :) Jehane talks about taking pictures in a garbage dump village in or near Cairo when she was eighteen, and how the photographs really moved the people who saw them in the exhibit (mostly in anger, incidentally). That got me thinking, and on my walk up to campus I came up with a “photographer’s creed,” describing the three primary roles in which I see myself as an amateur photographer, from least important to most:
1. Historian/Documentarian. I take pictures to preserve memories — of myself, of my friends and family, of my school and work and the other parts of my life. The aesthetic value of these pictures isn’t the point; getting the memories down is. Examples:
There’s not a lot of aesthetic value here, but that’s okay, because that’s not the point: they’re historical records, not art. (Not that I didn’t try to make them look good, of course, but again, that was secondary.)
2. Aesthete. I take pictures to preserve beauty. Photographs with excellent composition and color give me a lot of satisfaction, and I suspect I’m not alone in that appreciation. :) Beautiful photographs are like a glass of cool water to the parched soul.
Examples:
Conversely, there’s not much historical value here. And that’s fine, because these shots were taken with an eye toward catching a fragment of beauty, not recording something for history’s sake.
3. Eye-opener. Last, I take pictures to open people’s eyes to the world. While history and aesthetics matter, my own belief is that this role is the most important by a long shot. I want to move people, for good. The best photographs, in my opinion, are those which combine a vivid human interest with a keen eye for beauty. (Though with a strong human connection, aesthetics isn’t quite as important as usual.) I want to produce photography that tears at people’s heartstrings, that gives them warm fuzzies, that reminds them how much they cherish their family, that helps them appreciate other cultures, that stirs them to do something about poverty and poor living conditions, that inspires them to suck the marrow out of life. Occasionally the subject matter may be inanimate, but almost always the most powerful photographs will be those of people. Again, it’s all about human interest.
Examples, though they don’t quite catch the vision as much as I’d like:
I don’t have many of these, and I’ll admit that most of my own photography thus far has been in the first two categories. Most of the time I’m either on campus or at my apartment, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities for life-changing photography at either place, plush middle-to-upper-class locations that they are. :) (Let me add that while eye-opening photography is the most important, that doesn’t mean the other two are worthless. Far from it!)
In short, I want my photography to make a difference in people’s lives, not to just be a pretty picture. I want it to reverberate, to give goosebumps, to make hearts swell with compassion, to move people to do something.
I’ve got a long way to go. :)
