Photography is personal

At last I’m back and normal service on my blog will resume. While in Belgium I met with several other photographers and was delighted to hear first-hand how much my blog is appreciated. Wish I could meet all of you dear readers. A big thanks to everyone.

I now have over 1,000 regular readers a month and the number is growing all the time.

On my travels I was thinking about why we take photographs and what they mean to us. My wife Magda and I chatted about it and as we looked back at the thousands of images we’ve made during the last two weeks we again realised what a fantastic diary they form.

Photography captures fragments of reality which make up the rich tapestry of our lives. There are no other art forms, except film and video which preserve these fleeting moments and still photography is all the more powerful because we can examine every detail of that split second at our leisure as it is registered on film or in pixels.

To me all of the images I make are personal, including the commercial ones, because they record a split second of my life as I saw it and experienced it through the lens. Photography is what I saw with my eye, what the camera registers and the product of my creative vision as I choose to interpret the raw visual material using software or in the darkroom. The finished print is my vision forever linked to that moment in time when I chose to push the shutter release.
If you think about it photography is a really intimate way of sharing your life with the world.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Well put, Paul!

It was nice chatting with you, and not only about photography.

I'm one of those regular readers, even though I don't always leave a comment.

Have a nice week-end,

Frank

18:00

Beyond the obvious said…

Thanks Frank. I really enjoyed talking to you too.

00:13

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