I’ve often wondered why I love photography. I observe a lasting divide: Realism and art.
I guess I’m aspiring more to meaning in my own personal photography. Do I capture beauty or ugly. Do I develop happiness or something else? Why, what purpose does my effort serve?
A nondescript pic from tonight. Just cleaned my sensor.
An interesting thought that has plagued me throughout my life.
On one, primary level I think (feel, may be more accurate) that I became a photographer because I discovered early that I lacked the skills to be a really good painter. As my interest was women, pretty much always has been, not having any of the skills of a Vargas meant photography was the sensible alternative to follow. But, the question that comes unbid, is this: has it been worth it? Yes, of course a level of success in the job of choice is pleasing, flatters the ego and provides lots of superficially exciting moments, but come the day you hang up the spurs - or they get removed from you - and what do you got, as they say? Pretty much nothing beyond memories, a little capital. There's nothing, in the form of a business, to sell as an ongoing concern:
you were the business, not the tools that anybody can buy for next to nothing. Great in the moment, but lousy when you are old, weaker, out of alternative skills or opportunity to use them should you have them.
But, you probaby only live once, so which way do you run?
As for realism or art, I think for a photographer the two are inextricably bound up. You can't escape the realism because unlike a painter, you can't invent: you're stuck with what is, which you then have to manipulate to the best of your ability. Sure, you can
arrange what's already there, but you can't produce new material out of thin air. The most open to you is the use of photographic understanding of how things behave.
Perhaps you slip into art when you have something within that lets you make informed choices from the possible, where another would merely set up, focus and shoot, capturing the obvious.
Making a distinction between personal photography and any other seems, to me, a bit odd. People hired me because of what I did, because I was who I was and thus did it as I did; they would have hired somebody else if that person had given them something they wanted more. There is no other reason why companies with huge budgets select the photographers that they do to shoot their campaigns: they like the person's style, which is that person's art, the bit that shines throughout all the different work he does.
That, your own sensibility, is your art, your visual, graphic personality.
"I guess I’m aspiring more to meaning in my own personal photography. Do I capture beauty or ugly. Do I develop happiness or something else? Why, what purpose does my effort serve?"
The question of aspiration to meaning seems slightly unreal: you do what you are
driven to do, choices based on opportunity and ability. To do anything but that strikes me as perverse: why on Earth would you do anything you don't feel compelled to do? Art isn't meant to be a painful occupation. As for purpose served, there is but one: your own sense of satisfaction. (I speak, of course, from the non-pro position of total freedom of choices.)
