sc 3, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.
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.
