A friend recently asked me about photography.
“When you go out with your camera… has there ever been a moment that stayed with you more than the photograph itself? Something you saw or felt that couldn’t really be captured, but remained with you anyway?”
Thinking about this question got me wondering about what it is that I enjoy about photography. What follows is an edited version of the answer that I gave.
A photograph conveys a small fraction of the experience we have in a moment. Whether it is the approximation of colour, capturing one moment in time, or that the frame captures a small window into the world in front of us. Every photograph is limited in what it can capture.
In any given moment, we experience the world around us through other senses and emotions. At best a photograph can hope to evoke these feelings in the viewer but it will never convey the feelings themselves.
It could be the smell of a wet market, the sounds of laughter or conversation in a cafe, or the expression in the moment before the shutter opened or the reaction to the sound of it closing. These are the things we remember, things no photograph ever captures.
I enjoy photography not because each image perfectly captures the experience of being in a moment. I enjoy it because of its limitations and imperfections, the things it leaves out. When looking at a photograph, it evokes a sense of curiosity. We aren’t handed a perfectly captured moment to enjoy, we are left with unknowns. Curiosity and wonder are inevitable.
I’ve started publishing old photographs in a series called Throwback Thursday. If you find yourself curious about any of the images in the series, wondering what led up to them, email me. Test my memory.