Sometimes you have the idea of a photo in your head, but it takes a few iterations to get there.
15 years ago or so, something clicked in my head: I started seeing the photos I wanted before I could take them, then I would look for where they might happen. Sometimes it took a long time, weeks or months, sometimes I knew instantly where I needed to go. At that point I stopped just going places and taking what was offered to me by the location, and my photography became a lot more intentional.
That’s in part why I struggle so much with street photography: street photography is more of an “in the instant” thing with whatever happens around you, and that’s not how I approach photography. I don’t get inspiration from events happening around me, from the flow; I get inspiration from visualising photos in my head in advance. Once I have such a theoretical photograph in my head, I become obsessed by it and I have a need to realise it. I feel it in my fingers.
Of course, having a photograph in my mind doesn’t mean that I know exactly what I need to take. There is a part of exploration in the process. The original idea is just the starting point of the journey, and often I need to find out what I meant during that journey. I only know that I have achieved my intent when I have a feeling of deja vu in front of the picture that tells me “Aha! That’s what I was looking for!”.
Lately, I’ve been itching to take petrol stations at night.
I’ve always found petrol stations at night appealing. They have colours, light, people coming and going, a purpose, they are an integral part of people’s travels, they tend to be isolated, but familiar and a welcome stop on a long journey.
And I’ve had an image in my head. I don’t know why. I rarely know why I have a specific image in my head. It just became obvious one day. I knew what I wanted to achieve. Mostly as a feeling and a fuzzy image that needed firming up.
But getting the right environment and circumstances to make the photo happen isn’t always straightforward. I don’t like to change things so I don’t control my environment very much. I don’t like moving stones, I don’t like adding light, I don’t removing things from the scene. So, finding the perfect place that allows me to realise an image that lives my head isn’t easy.
It all started with a photo of a small petrol station I took on a Saturday night.
This is exactly what I wanted. It had the feeling of isolation, the cone of light coming from the canopy, the splashes of bright red colour, and the darkness. I loved that image esthetically.
In that, it was a success. But I knew when I saw it that something was missing: I wanted someone in it to give it a human dimension and to increase the sense of human isolation, not just of geographical isolation. I wanted more of a Hopper or Crewdson vibe. I wanted to tell a story in a single frame.
So I went back with my wife and experimented with a few setups I had in mind to try to firm up what image I really had in my head. The original idea I had been thinking about wasn’t possible, unfortunately: literally the second we got to location, the lights around the petrol station switched off. I had planned to have her against the car, near the petrol station, under her own cone of light coming down from a street light to balance the image and repeat the reds and the cone of light. We couldn’t try again earlier because then it would be too early and not night yet and the sky would be too bright.
So, falling back on other ideas, my first try was to simply have my wife refuel one of our cars (the red one of course), to make it seem like she was isolated, in the middle of nowhere, scared maybe.
But that didn’t tell me enough of a story. I didn’t get a sense of where she came from and where she was going. There was no happening. She was just refueling a car.
So I asked her to lean on the car and look at her phone (mine actually, she left hers at home).
That was better. I had the light from the petrol station, the splashes of red, the blue reflection of the phone screen on her, and a bit more of a story: she’s having car trouble maybe? Trying to find someone to call?
I also asked her to lean on a nearby handrail to see if the composition was more balanced with her outside of the petrol station.
What I didn’t like about that one is that the car was lost at the petrol station, but I found the overall image more interesting. And then I had a revelation: I knew what the photo needed to be. I finally knew what the feeling I had was and what would produce that feeling in an image.
What I wanted was to tell the woman’s story: she has run out of petrol metres away from a petrol station. Nearly got there, but not quite. There is no way she can push that car on her own these few metres. The petrol station is slightly run down because it’s the tail end of petrol cars, as shown by the partially working price sign in the back and the broken light in the canopy. The near future. She needs to call someone, but in the middle of nowhere she has no phone signal. She tries hard to get a signal though, holding her phone as high as she can. It’s a disaster night. Civilisation is nearby, but unreachable by modern tools.
So we went back but that time I knew what to expect in terms of environment and I knew exactly what to do. I had made a plan in my head and taken notes to not forget anything. It took a few nights of waiting because of rain. It was excruciating to have to wait to attempt to take that photo.
And the result is the photo at the top. To me it sets a scene, it tells a story, hints a before and after, it has a good balance, and enough detail interest to keep the viewer’s attention. And yes, the open door is a wink at Crewdson’s obsession with open car doors to create a dynamic element, but different because I’m not just copying, so my wife stands in the doorway. some of the elements are fairly subtle and not easy to see on a small image, e.g. some of the digits on the price sign aren’t working right (an 8 is a E, a 9 became a square and a disconnected line).
And I know I’m taking a single photograph way too seriously. But I have reached what I had in my head and scratched my itch.
In a way I was lucky because it only took 3 trips to that station and a few days to get to where I wanted my image to be. Sometimes it takes much longer.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Personal