Capturing experience

j 20, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So often a camera falls short of capturing beauty, because beauty isn’t just something you can see with your eyes. Beauty is an experience, a feeling, a state of mind, an everything. Photos can only represent a fraction of all that; a single dimension.

When I took photos of a sunrise in Jersey, I was surprised the visual beauty came through as well as it did. Yet however it may seem from the pictures, a viewer still can’t grasp exactly what it was like to be there.

The bitingly cold air, the sand muddy and dense like half-set concrete, dipping and bumping, wet feet, seagulls screaming, the smell of seaweed waking up, but most of all, the neverending panorama that even a fisheye lens can’t take in. 360 degrees of stones and sea and sand. Eyefuls of sky stretching out to everywhere. Two hours of chameleon clouds, rising from navy to blue, purple, pink, orange, gold, lemon, streaked with steely grey, blinding white sun breaking through. Not just the sky; the sand itself, wet and receptive, took on every colour like a folded inkblot, punctuated by rocks and lumps.

That 120-minute-long movement, where every colour changes imperceptibly every second, is impossible to record in a single shot. The smells, the feelings, the sounds; they’re complements to that image that now exist only in my mind and in my memory and that no amount of words can equal.

What I mean is, if these pictures look like 100% beauty, the reality was more like ten times that. These images may look beautiful, but nothing compares with actually being there and experiencing it. But equally, experiencing it is nothing unless you see the beauty in it.

Images that speak

sc 3, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

I often think that if I can make people think differently; if I could change something fundamental about the world, open minds, eyes and hearts, it would all be worth it. I’m not talking about education, voluntary work, medical care or anything like that. Although they’re incredibly important, what matters to me is more abstract.

When I’m reading about politicians and big companies, stock markets and world issues, I wonder how a single picture could ever stand a chance of having the power to change anything. A lot of my photos centre on the idea of beauty and visual niceness. Photos like this will never change the world.

What if I could combine beauty with the sort of moral and personal impact I want? The obvious way to do this is by presenting a problematic, thought-provoking subject in a beautiful way. But do ugly subjects deserve to be portrayed in a beautiful light? After all, the way I present my subject determines, to an extent, how I see it, how I want others to see it, and what it means. Would it be right to take a stunning picture of a woman smoking, let’s say? Would the image’s beautiful form mean that the content of the image – smoking – is good, simply by association?

How about the reverse – portraying a beautiful subject in an ugly way? To me, letting ugliness come into the form of the image just seems like bad photography, but there is always room for ugliness in an image’s content. Catching a half-made-up starlet or a beggar outside a plush hotel forces the viewer to consider the contrast between ugliness and beauty. But the bottom line is that, technically, a bad photo can never rise above being a bad photo.

Sometimes it’s easier just to take beautiful pictures of beautiful things. That makes me happy. It’s satisfying. But sometimes it feels incredibly empty, as if the dynamic in the photos is all positive, blinkered, overpowering. There’s nothing in them that engages the viewer; nothing to make you think. I want my pictures to speak.