Looking at Photographs
I picked up two used books* this weekend, both by Stephen Shore: The Nature of Photographs, and Modern Instances. I sat down to look through The Nature of Photographs while I drank my tea this morning, and got so caught up that I was almost late dropping my kid off.
We spend more time looking at images than any generation before us, but I wonder if we remember to actually See those images when we spend so much time inundated by them. How much time do I spend watching camera reviews on YouTube vs. looking at photographs.
The Nature of Photographs is one of those books that I’ll leave out on my coffee table long after I finish it just because I can’t bear to put it away. The text to image ratio is probably 5 to 1 images to text but honestly I made that number up, because it’s not the easiest thing to measure. Shore provides a small block of text to guide you into how to think about images and then follows it up with images that speak for themselves.
A photographer I would love to credit, if I could remember who it was, mentioned that they keep a photo book out on their desk, turning one page a day. A stack of your own prints flipped once per day would be even more brutal, but if you can’t stare at your own work for 24 hours then it probably isn’t worth the ink its printed on.
The image above I have had on the Frame TV in my bedroom for the past few years. I keep saying I’m going to change the image, but I never do. I stare at it every night as I fell asleep. I probably have it memorized, the rocks, the waves, the layers of color cutting across the frame with that diagonal line. Honestly, I love it. I put it up originally as a test image, and then it grew on me. The longer I looked the more I loved it. Which beats the alternative.
The last time I was in Maui, I decided to go back to the beach where this was taken. I stood in the exact same spot 5 years later. But the beach looked nothing like this. In the years since I had photographed, and then memorized, every nuance of this beach, time didn’t stand still. Only the photograph remained unchanged. I sat on that beach for an hour, looking at the photographs I hadn’t taken. The ones passing me by. The images I did take are of a completely different beach than the one I stare at every night while I fall asleep.
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