I am no photographer.
I readily admit this. You can see my dabblings in my flickr feed to the right here, but these really are just dabblings. Most of the time, I just point and click. The pure serendipidy of the camera and the subject being conveniently syncronised in their progress through life makes the picture.
What I have found interesting, as a recent explorer into pictorial realms, is the way our attitudes towards taking pictures is changing with the development of sophisticated digital cameras. There is now a physical distance between ourselves and the camera as we take a picture using a digital camera – we are no longer right up close to the machine in the same intimate way as was previously required. We can also view each picture within seconds, judge it, and discard it instantly if it is not to our liking. We no longer have to finish the film, pay to process it and wait days for the finished, silky prints to arrive.
Being the owner and user of a nice new digital camera (my first ever camera in fact!), I am particularly interested to know what difference this physical distance makes, as we hold our cameras away from us to take a picture, instead of up to our eyes. For my own part, it means that my pictures are much less about what I am seeing from my position in the world, but more about what the world looks like at arms’ length away. It is almost like looking at the world through my finger tips – I see what they would see in my jpgs. On one occasion, I held my camera out over the edge of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol to get a shot of the bridge’s shadow on the cliff: something I did not see with my own eyes in full. Does this make the camera my aid to seeing things in the world that my eyes, due to their geography in my body, cannot see?
Maybe holding the machine close and committing a physical process in taking the photograph – involving chemical imprinting – causes us to have a more precious, personal relationship with the resulting picture? The results of this process are also physical, rather than simply light impulses on our computer screens. Does this deepen our involvement with the picture? Does it mean I am missing something intimate and pure about the art by going digital? Is it like the way taste and smell invoke memory? Or does it not really matter at all, as long as the image captures an essence in colours and shadows that can be manipulated and stored?
I am sure the issue will continue to puzzle me as I wander through scenes, hopefully clicking/ticking away, but many things puzzle me about images and views, so what’s new?!
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