Why I love photography

I am going to indulge a little and explain to you why I love the hobby I spend a lot of my time on. I guess this will be an overview that will explain to you, if you were wondering, my story with photography, but it also allows me to spend some time justifying spending so much money on camera gear when really, I should be thinking about how the frick I am going to pay for postgraduate study.

It is difficult to decide when I first ‘got into’ photography. Should it be the first time I used a camera? When I realised I loved photography? When I bought my first dSLR? If it is the latter then it was at the very beginning of this year, but my story goes back much further than that. I always loved looking at photographs, in magazines, on the internet and I would spend hours as a child pouring through my parents and grandparents old photo albums (I still do this from time to time), but on family holidays I was never really the one taking the photographs.

I think I first started taking photos when I got my now deleted MySpace account. When I was 16, when MySpace was cool, I used to do a lot of self-portraiture with a compact camera, I’m not ashamed to admit this, as it is something that is still very prominent in my photos today and I will elaborate on this later.

As Susan Sontag wrote,

Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality, that one can make or acquire.¹

I fell for this accessibility of photography and its ability to capture moments in time. In consuming photography I could access parts of the world, or of other peoples lives, that I would otherwise never see, and in taking photographs I could create a permanent record of my own life.

I decided that I wanted to take this further and I actually did an A-level in photography whilst studying in further education. It was okay, I learnt the basic technical stuff such as aperture, ISO, shutter speeds and how they worked, but other than that the course was taught purely from an artistic approach. I did two main projects for my assignments, the first was a study of nature vs urban, lots of photos of nature and lots of street photography, and my second project was people. I did some candid shots of some friends and family, a band at a local gig and I also did a MySpace themed project, asking people at my sixth form college to write on a piece of paper what they thought of MySpace and to hold it in front of them for a portrait.

It was fun, but my photos weren’t great at all. I was shooting mainly with a Fujifilm Finepix s5600, something which I bought purely so I could play with the manual functions… I really didn’t want to use a camera on automatic. See, my intentions were good.

OLD PHOTO ALERT! A portrait of my friend Karim taken on the Fujifilm, May 2007.

After the A-level I wanted to carry on taking lots of photos, and I promised myself I would buy a better camera as soon as I had the money, but I went off to University and this just never happened. I did continue to take photos, but not very often.

Then at some point during the summer of 2009, I suddenly feel back in love with photography with a force. I put this down to ditching DeviantArt for Flickr, where I much prefer the community, and being utterly inspired by some of my favourite Flickr members.

My camera timeline progressed, finally getting hold of a dSLR and some lenses and accessories, and my awesome birthday gift of a 35mm film SLR. Taking up shooting film was an idea I had romanced with for some time. I grew up in a digital age but there is something so enticing about taking photographs on film, and you can’t beat the way film looks when it is processed. I think to truly love and enjoy photography one must experiment with film, after all, it is where it all started.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched by pathos.³

An elderly man I snapped recently in Nottingham city centre.

I am now obsessed with bokeh and shallow depth of field, I continue to enjoy taking self-portraits, still life and I often find myself taking photographs of people in public without them realising it like some sort of ninja. I have always been a curiously voyeuristic person. I am always very aware of who is around me when I am out in public, and I watch people, they fascinate me; but I like to keep my distance and my camera provides a good hiding spot. I am very interested in individuals, in society and in culture, and my love of photography can encompass this by allowing me to take photographs of these things, and more importantly to consume photographs of these things.

To this day I thoroughly enjoy consuming photography as much as I love taking photos. The Flickr community is really friendly and inspiring, and being able to share my attempts at taking good photos is motivational to say the least. I enjoy the knowledge that I have a lot to learn and a lot to improve with my hobby, that is what makes it worthwhile.

Photographs… help people take possession of space in which they are insecure.²

Again Susan Sontag’s words, (such a good read), words that I believe to be very true for me. Taking possession of the space in which I am insecure… in society, in my own body, in education, in relationships and so on.

One of my latest selfies, it made the front page of Flickr explore

As I said, self-portraiture was something I started in my teens, and now it is something I often turn back to. Other than enjoying the challenge (getting focus can be a bitch), and using myself as a subject because it is easier than finding other subjects (that would mean I have to spend time with other people, which I don’t often like to do), I like the way that I can express my feelings through my physical appearance. Some of my photographs are revealing, not just physically but mentally. I’ve never been good at expressing my feelings but doing it through photos just seems right… and less invasive.

In a nutshell, self-portraiture is just another reason why I love photography for all of the above reasons. I am very aware that my most interesting photos (the ones with the most views and activity) on Flickr are self-portraits with the exception of a few, and this doesn’t really bother me, such is the nature of society. If using my self and body makes for an interesting photograph then I am achieving something I set out to do. That said, I would love to get more recognition on my photos that are of other subjects, and, at the risk of contradicting my feminist side, although I know it is occurring, I do not wish to objectify myself; it is just a form of expression.

Showing my skin & using morning sunshine for a self-portrait.

I will conclude here by saying simply this, I love photography because it is the most mysterious way to look at and capture the world. A photograph is always ambiguous, often equivocal, and that is what is so enchanting about it.

Notes

1. Sontag, S., (2002) On Photography, Penguin Classics, p. 4.

2. Ibid., p. 9

3. Ibid., p. 15