Personal photography
My niece has spent four weeks photographing on full automatic. She understands what photography is for, she’s developed her eye, she knows how images communicate. Now she’s encountering situations where automatic settings prevent her from achieving what she wants. That’s perfect timing for introducing technical control.
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.
Week four combines analysis with continued practice. My niece has been making photographs for three weeks, and she’s developed intuitions about what works and what doesn’t. Now we’ll make those intuitions conscious by looking at strong work and breaking down how it functions.
Photography has a self-image problem, and it starts with the word “witness.”
The term has circulated in photographic theory long enough to feel like settled truth. Photographers bear witness. They stand at the edge of events, recording what happens with a fidelity that makes them morally adjacent to the thing itself. The word carries gravity, seriousness, a suggestion that the camera is a kind of secular conscience pointed at the world.
On closer inspection, it is also dishonest.
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.
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.
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.
