Personal photography
I often see people looking at photographs and talking about their composition, colours, and message like they’re paintings. It seems expected that great photos have been thought through, planned, and perfectly executed, as if made in a studio. But does it make sense?
To me, street photography feels like an intrusion in other people’s lives. The more I think about it and the more I try to do it, the more I feel uncomfortable about it.
This is of course ignoring the issues with truth, representation, ethics, and consequences. This is really the first step of that more general reflection: whether the activity should or can even take place and its place in reality.
Sometimes you have the idea of a photo in your head, but it takes a few iterations to get there.
We exist in time. Not as discrete snapshots. One of the difficulties of photography is to capture in a single frame what is part of a stream of consciousness. This idea has bothered me for a long time and it feels like a failure that photos aren’t part of the stream of consciousness.
In a world that often feels overwhelming and difficult to decode, I’ve found a lens to be more than just a tool. It’s become my interpreter, helping me understand and connect with a reality that sometimes seems to speak a different language than I do.
I see photography not just as the activity of producing images/art/a record, but also as a bridge between our internal landscape and the external world we selectively engage with. While we cannot directly photograph thoughts or emotions (yet), our choices in subject matter, composition, and timing reveal the invisible threads of our inner narrative.
In today’s world, we’re constantly bombarded with photography. The perfectly curated, Instagram-ready images that tell a story in a single frame. But one of the most important things I’ve realized in the last few years is just how significant it is to take photos of the people around you. Not the posed, carefully staged portraits we think of as “important” pictures, but the candid, everyday snapshots that capture the essence of who these people really are.
As I said before, I’m not a social media person. I often find myself questioning whether I should try harder to be on those platforms and what they could possibly give me.
In an age where photos are posted daily (hourly? Minutely? Secondly?) on platforms like X and Instagram, it’s easy to overlook the deeper intentions behind each image. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on this: why people take the photos they do, how they approach it, and what they see in those images. And as I’ve navigated these thoughts, one platform has kept me coming back: Substack.
In the pursuit of photographic excellence, we often find ourselves trapped in a self-imposed prison of technical perfection. Sharp focus, precise framing, and optimal exposure become our jailers, limiting our creative expression and emotional connection to the images we create. But what if these supposed imperfections are not flaws at all, but rather windows into a deeper, more authentic form of storytelling?
I didn’t grow up with social media. I grew up in an era when computers were uncommon and the (public) internet didn’t exist. For example, at the end of high school, I chose to attend a computing exam as part of baccalaureate, even though I had never had a lesson, my high school didn’t have a single computer, and it was one of the first years this could be done, so there was very little material about what to expect (I got 95% without ever knowing why I didn’t get 100%).
