Dramatically framed against the sky, an expensive camera at his eye, he’s taking pictures. He’s a photographer- in the same sense that a man holding a saw is a carpenter, or that a man holding a torch is a welder.
Photographers have become admired figures, cultural celebrities- in fashion studios or on battlefields. But like carpenters or welders, that’s just what they do- they take pictures. And it’s the pictures that count.
Since photography became practical in the mid-1800’s, photographs have been used for many different purposes. In the beginning, photographs were relatively cheap, easy to produce substitutes for paintings and drawings. Most of them were portraits, images of people; landscapes, pictures of places, plain reproductions, of no particular artistic value.
That’s still true today. But a few photographers realized that photographs had unique qualities of their own, different from paintings and drawings, and began to use them as an artistic medium. They had, and still have, a difficult time with the public.
Anyone can see that a painter needs talent and skill to paint. But since anyone can take a clear photograph, people thought there was nothing to it, that no special feeling or talent was required. They valued a photo only for the subject that was pictured in it- their friends, a famous actress, a dead gangster.
Photographers were celebrated- but only for having access to famous people or dangerous situations, not for the merit of the photographs themselves. That’s true even now; but a small public has grown up that understands that photographs can produce an emotionally powerful picture of the world that comes from the person behind the camera, not from what was in front of it.
For myself, I have tried to do something a little different. Like other photographers, I wanted picture the world around me in emotional terms. But I wanted to add words to those pictures, to combine images and language together, and express something that neither could express alone. I have used this column to do this, sometimes successfully, I hope.
I have been doing this column weekly now, for better and worse, for two years. Over the next few weeks I want to “replay” those columns that seem to me to have best accomplished what I set out to do in the beginning. I hope my readers will enjoy seeing them again. If not, they can always turn the page.
