Life and things

br 15, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

Sometimes I just feel like part of the scenery. How can you engage with the world when you are the world? How can something physical capture anything more than the physical?

In the world, life and objects meet, interact, happen. In a picture, life can never exist. Everything is an object, for everything is colours and lines on a 5×7′ piece of glossy paper.

I touch my desk, a book, a mug of tea. I’m alive, moving, choosing. I am me, rippling and humming with facets. But in a photograph I’m just as static and inhuman as any object. All flat in lines and a present past. All dead but seeming real. And there’s half a heartbeat of me, with that thought in my head, words frozen mid-flow in the space of my mind like juggling balls. Feeling angry, disappointed, satisfied, deceptive, victorious? You’d never know if I was one or none or all of them at once; I’m not just alive, I’m beyond alive, unreachable, unseeable, unthingable.

Nature

p 16, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

There’s something odd about using a digital camera to photograph nature. It’s so man-made, so black and static and hard: everything that nature isn’t. The image isn’t even real in the way that film images are. Instead of light and molecules, everything depends on pixels and sensors, and the finished product often doesn’t even make it into existence like negatives and prints; all you see is more pixels on a screen.

Put a pixel under a microscope and all you see is a pixel. But put a leaf or a strip of film under there and you’ll see elements, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, energy. In this sense digital photography is a simplification of reality. How permissible is it to reduce the physical world we inhabit to a single dimension; to create something virtual from something so real; to condense all the richness of the world into blocks of light? Isn’t that doing it a disservice?

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.