On a chilly January morning, sunrise on the way, coffee in hand I reflected on my photography. I have not been taking a lot of photos in the past few years. Was it all the life changes that came with the pandemic times? I have lived through adversity and changes in my life before and I still took photographs, so I discounted the tribulations of the past few years as a root cause for my photography block.
After more cups of coffee, it dawned on me that I did it to myself.
Story telling, and to a degree social media was my issue. For years I looked at YouTube and read articles on what a photographer should be doing with their work, telling a story, cultivating your voice, posting to social media. Stories were key and if you were not telling a story your images were just less and no one will care. Photos single or a series that tell a story vs photo out of context was the question circling my overly caffeinated mind that January morning. Photos out of context are photographs without a strong intrinsic value to a story or narrative, but just because I like it. A one-off photo can tell a story, but it may require the viewer make up their own story, which can be in the frame or out of the frame. Can a single photo tell a story? The answer is yes of course. Do photographs need to tell a story? The answer for me now will at least be no because it has cost me too much.
I adopted a process which included storytelling, monitoring my social media and wondering if my photos impacted anyone’s conscience. I would ask myself, does the photo have meaning or intent? If the answer was no, then perhaps the photo is deficient. That is where things started to go very wrong. To put it simply, having a narrative in my photographs and wondering if people would like them was crushing my creativity.
In my younger days, some would say I was taking my best photos, I did not care what people thought and I was not trying to tell stories, on purpose. I just did it because I loved to shoot. Now I am just older, and I give less fucks in general about things, especially that are less important. That is not always true, but my point is, I need to apply my general attitude towards life at my age to my photography now and get back to what I did before, just take photographs.
I am there to create, for myself.
I will stop the internal debate about storytelling vs out of context and just do what I love. I take photographs.
