Two Sides to Every Photograph
It is time to pause, to stop and appreciate a moment, a place, a feeling. This is what photography is to me. What I get out of creating an image is an experience. My camera is an excuse to go to new places and witness them for myself. I want to have my reaction to a place, to form my attachment, and to have a personal encounter that is mine alone. This is what the act of photography is for me. It is an individual endeavor. Being out and creating photographs is a personal and unique experience. When I set out to make photographs, I am not looking for images; I am looking for enjoyment. I want to savor my day and time in new or familiar surroundings. I want to capture my reaction to something intriguing. I want to create a visual representation of my feelings, my emotional response, to a particular moment. The resulting image will be, for me, the photographer, a reminder of that moment. It will reignite my experience, how I felt then, and in that place. As a photographer, I hope to convey at least a small amount of my experience—the feelings I had while creating the image, the mood I was in then.
As a viewer, it is impossible to truly live the experience of being there. A good image, however, will convey at least some notion of mood or feeling. The magic of a photograph is its ability to evoke an emotion and transport a viewer to a location, to conjure the memories of similar places. Perhaps the smell of pine trees, or the spray of salt water. It could spark a memory of past family trips, summers spent at the beach, or hiking in the mountains. It could ignite a desire to travel to a place and experience it for yourself. Or simply explore locally and have a similar experience. A photograph can spark questions about how something came to be. What circumstances led to the creation of such conditions? What did it take even to make this image? One hundred different people can view an image, and it can ignite 100 different reactions. A photograph is a personal experience. And each viewer brings their own life experience to the interpretation, just as the photographer poured their own life experience into creating that image.
There are always two sides to every story. In this case, there are two sides to every photograph—that of the photographer and that of the viewer. As Ansel Adams put it, “There are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer.”
