Personal photography
The universe doesn’t care about us. That’s not pessimism; it’s physics. We’re pattern-seeking creatures dropped into a system operating on principles entirely indifferent to human comfort. Entropy increases, complexity spirals, and meaning is something we have to manufacture ourselves because the cosmos isn’t providing it. For a long time I didn’t have a practical way to live with that fact. Photography became one.
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.
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.
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.
Your audience self-selects partly based on shared cognitive architecture. This isn’t about intelligence or sophistication. It’s about whether your mode of thinking and communicating matches theirs closely enough that recognition happens.
My mother sometimes jokes that she raised a ghost, because there are barely any photographs of me as a child or teenager. I just hated having my photo taken and I’d find ways to hide to avoid it. When I started photography ca. 2002, I started taking photos of people around me. But I continued to hide from them when they wanted to take photos of me. My relationship with them was imbalanced.
It took me another 15 years to realise I was being stupid.
Photography instruction assumes cognitive uniformity. Teachers describe their own process and expect students to replicate it. “Learn to see the light.” “Pre-visualise the image.” “Feel the moment.” These instructions make perfect sense if your brain works like the teacher’s brain, but they become incomprehensible if it doesn’t.
I can tell you exactly how I felt standing on a sand dune in Morocco many years ago, watching my wife photograph a sand dune through evening light. I remember the temperature, the angle of the sun, the smell of dust. I remember the specific quality of happiness that comes from being exactly where you want to be with exactly who you want to be there with. That moment is still accessible to me. I was there. It happened. The photos prove it.
Photography education and criticism privilege verbal articulation. You’re expected to be able to explain your work, discuss your influences, articulate your intentions, write artist statements. Grants and residencies require written proposals. Publications want accompanying text. Teaching positions demand that you can explain your process clearly.
But many talented photographers can’t write coherently about their work, and it’s not because they haven’t thought deeply about it or because they’re inarticulate generally. It’s because the work happens in a non-verbal mode and translating it into words requires cognitive machinery they don’t have or have configured differently.
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.
