Years of landscape photography eventually crystallised into something I could trust. The experimentation settled, the instincts took hold, and I started recognising my own hand in a frame before I could explain why. A composition either felt like mine or it didn’t.
Then I started shooting street, and shortly after that, documentary work around people I knew. Both felt like arriving somewhere new with instincts calibrated for somewhere else, the technical knowledge and compositional logic transferring cleanly because the principles were the same (photography is photography), but my eye wasn’t right.
For example, when working in the street, I would compose my frames as I built landscapes: strong foreground interest, 100% depth of field, horizon horizontal, verticals vertical, human subjects exactly in the right place (no matter how long it took to get everything fall into place), leading lines, perspective effect, etc. But looking at the result, you could tell I was out of place.
I read Jeanne Cavelos’s Technomages trilogy, set in the Babylon 5 universe, in 2001-2002 shortly after I moved to Aberdeen. I wasn’t watching much TV and YouTube and other streaming sites didn’t exist yet, so I was reading a lot. And I’m a huge loserB5 fan. Reading that trilogy, more than any of the other B5 trilogies (I read them all of course), was a complete revelation. Suddenly, everything technomages, which was barely touched in the TV series, made perfect sense.
And in a weird way, it helped me understand what was happening to my photography as I was switching genre and what was the feeling I had.
Spoilers for the series ahead.
The technomage Galen receives the same shadow-tech implants as every other technomage. Where others master spells and incantations, Galen reduces everything to mathematics and equations to match his way of thinking. He finds that beneath the visible magic lie fundamental formulas, and eventually locates the root equation from which all the others derive. That root equation acts as the undistilled source of the power. The absence of the filter ceremonies and magic woo-woo allowed Galen to actually understand the raw power of the technology.
Similarly, what I had mistaken for my complete photographic identity in landscapes turned out to be one expression of a deeper system. A partial view on top of a model that expressed only some of that model (think MVC model and views if you’re into programming services).
But I had the feeling, just out of my grasp, that there was a shared kernel there. Some underlying truth that fuelled the basis for all genres that I couldn’t fully see. I could just feel its presence.
Each new context functions as a different scaffolding elevating some aspects of that kernel. Landscape photography relies on aesthetic taste and a shared understanding of nature. Street photography surfaces instinct for placing human presence within architecture and negative space. Documentary work exposes editorial preferences, the kind of moment you reach for and the kind you leave behind. None of these genres being the whole thing.
The trap is confusing genre competence with artistic maturity. Technical fluency within a specific area can feel like a finished identity when it’s actually one instantiation of something larger. Style at that level is easy enough to name or fake, but the version underneath resists understanding because it doesn’t live in subject matter or technique. It cuts across both.
I haven’t managed to reach that underlying formula yet. This is part why I write this newsletter: to search for it, to make it surface by asking questions about meaning, purpose, relationships. I hope to eventually reach enlightenment and finally understands what photography is.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Theory