“It’s not that I don’t care about content, but content is not the only way a photograph has meaning,” says photographer James Welling. He’s known for making beautiful images of light. Similar to this idea, photographer Laure Winants did something similar with a photogram process. Photographer Nicole Struppert also followed this format in her KENSHO series. We’ve also featured the work of Nils Karlson, who did something similar while channeling his glaucoma. Because photographs are often of something literal, our minds then try to search for meaning in an image. It’s a mystery — and mystery is the most powerful part of photography that so many of us are missing out on. Read on for the Power of Photography that I’m talking about.
Mystery is what gets people curious. Around the end of last year on my annual vacation, I shot a bunch of images using a haze filter, slow shutter speed effects, intentional camera movement, and some creative freedom. I wanted to make images that looked completely different. To many people, they think they can recognize the scenes or the places, but it could all have to do with their own associations with what they see in the photo. And that’s the thing: everyone can see and feel their own things in the images.
This isn’t photojournalism where things are typically very state-of-the-fact. Instead, this is an artistic photography process that can be done with almost nay camera you can get your hands on. It’s not about the AI scene detection, autofocus tracking, pixel peeping, etc. Instead, it’s just about looking at the image and expressing how you feel about something. You, as the photographer, might be attracted to what you made. So might someone else. In reality, it’s only really photographers who might not like your work because the art form is so incredibly polarizing. Landscape photographers wouldn’t necessarily care to see something from portrait photographers. Wildlife photographers don’t care about wedding photography. Fashion photographers probably won’t care about any of those.
The art here is in taking a photo of something that your subject matter isn’t. You, as the photographer, need to find a way to do that. It could surely be through in-camera movement. But it could also be done using some other photography method such as abstraction. The key here though is to think about things that put your own unique mark on them and that show us a world that we can’t get from an AI image processor.
That, in turn, often means that we need to stop taking inspiration from other visual mediums. Instead, it’s a great idea to get motivated by music, literature, etc. More importantly, one should try to understand poetry and metaphors.