Personal photography
Not legally, though we’ll get to the murky ethics of that. I mean conceptually, technically, aesthetically. Every image I’ve made is somewhere on a spectrum between homage and plagiarism, filtered through techniques I borrowed from photographers who borrowed them from other photographers who borrowed them from painters who probably borrowed them from someone else. Nothing I’ve done is original. I’m not sure anything in photography is.
I like to get my hands on photographs that people have discarded. These meant something to someone at some point, and it pains me to see that they’re being thrown away now.
I’ll start a series of posts about these photos as I scan them. I’ll post the entire rolls since I can’t know what the intent of the original author was.
This series contains photos taken from a few places around Spain in August 1966 according to the negatives jacket. Most are from Barcelona and surroundings, but not all.
Ansel Adams talked about pre-visualisation as the foundation of his photographic method. He could see the final print before making the exposure, knowing exactly what the image would look like after development and printing. Not just approximately but precisely. The vision came first, complete and detailed, and the technical process existed to manifest that internal image in physical form.
If you can do that, if you can see the finished photograph in your mind before you press the shutter, your entire approach to photography centres on capturing that vision. You’re trying to match what you see in your head with what the camera records. The image exists first internally, then you make it real through technical execution. Vision precedes and guides craft.
Photography isn’t one thing anymore. It hasn’t been for a while, but we’re still using the same word for fundamentally different activities, which creates confusion about what’s happening to the medium and why it matters.
There are four distinct categories of photography now, defined by who makes the image and who consumes it. Understanding these categories and how they’re bleeding into each other is more important than endless hand-wringing about what AI generation does.
Josh Warner posted on Substack photos he took with a Kodak DC210A he bought for next to nothing on a flee market.
This was a version of my first digital camera (mine was a DC200) I bought with one of my first salaries in the UK as I was working on a post doc project.
I dug up some old photos from my archive taken with that camera. I only have a few since I had it stolen very quickly after I bought it (it was in my rucksack, with my ID papers, my wallet, and my house keys).
Most of these were taken around Edinburgh, where I lived at the time. I seem to have shot in low resolution (640×480) because storage was at a premium in the 90s (and note that these images survived nearly 30 years in my archives without cloud storage!). They are unmodified, as they came out of the camera at the time.
Most people assume everyone thinks the same way they do. They imagine that when you say “picture this in your mind,” everyone experiences roughly the same thing. When you say “think about it,” everyone has the same internal process. But cognitive variation is enormous, and these differences fundamentally change how you approach photography.
On my way back from Lyon recently, I experimented with trying to convey meaning over prettiness.
Photography requires something other arts don’t: you have to be there. A thing happens, a camera records it, but you (or your apparatus) must be positioned in relationship to something real. Without that presence, there is no photography.
This might seem obvious, but it’s actually an important constraint that sets everything about photographic practice.
Out of cycle post. This is something I’ve been noticing and I’ve been trying to articulate for a while. I’m not sure it’s completely clear in my head yet, but here goes nothing.
When I started writing on Substack, I was already moving away from pretty pictures. I’d been getting interested in people more than landscapes, in human presence more than nice light falling across empty scenery. But I hadn’t yet articulated why that shift was happening or where it might lead.
In today’s near infinite storage space, it’s easy to lose track of the photos you take. You stop seeing any of them because there are so many of them. They become wallpaper, a continuous scroll of undifferentiated moments that mean nothing precisely because they were supposed to mean everything.
