Personal photography
My niece will spend weeks two and three developing her eye through structured assignments, all while keeping the camera on automatic. She’s comfortable with the tool by now but not thinking about it technically. The focus is on what she’s seeing and choosing to capture.
I was re-reading some of my old posts lately because I’ve started work on a mini book based on my Substack posts’ underlying ideas; more on that another time. As I was doing so, I realised that some of my ideas had evolved and warranted a revisit.
Street photography makes me uncomfortable. I’ve thought about it carefully enough times to be confident it isn’t squeamishness, and the discomfort survives every attempt to reason it away. And I’ve tried.
More photos I found. These feel so much like photos that could have come straight out of my childhood. The clothes, the place, I’ve been there
The first session with my niece will establish what photography is actually for, but not through abstract discussion. She’ll have her camera in hand from the first minute, set to full automatic, and we’ll be taking photographs while talking about why we’re taking them.
You already know the photograph. Nick Ut took it in 1972 on a road in Vietnam: a girl running, napalm smoke behind her. It may have shortened a war. Not because it was beautifully composed or appeared in the right publication, but because it was real. The girl existed. The road existed. Light bounced off a child in actual pain and entered a camera, and that causal chain is what gave the picture its weight.
Photography has always worked this way. The image is indexed to reality, meaning it cannot exist without the thing it depicts. A painting of a burning village is interpretation; a photograph of one is evidence. This follows not from quality or intent but from physics. Light enters. The world leaves a trace.
This is another of my found rolls of negatives.
My niece is twelve. She loves taking photos with whatever’s in her pocket, but the 550D I gave her sits mostly untouched in a drawer. Too much camera. Too serious. Too intimidating. That fact made me think carefully about how in my opinion photography should be taught and what order things should happen in.
I’ll make this another Sunday mini-series.
I’ve been thinking about how photographers develop over time. Looking at what I’ve been writing over the last few months, I see contradictions and incoherencies that bother me. So I set out to find the underlying thinking or framework that would unify these ideas.
The next roll of found photos seems to cover winter celebrations. I’d say February. But I don’t know the year.
Once you understand your cognitive profile, the question becomes what to do with that understanding. You can fight your natural architecture, trying to develop capabilities you don’t have, or you can lean into it, developing along pathways that suit how your mind actually works. One approach is frustrating and rarely successful. The other is sustainable and often produces stronger results.
