On Photography

Picture editing is an extremely tedious but good process. It forces you look at all your pictures—the good, the bad and the ugly—and really think about if you’re really doing the kind of work you want, both technically and creatively. People think that photography is all about clicking away, but I think most photographers would agree that they spend most of their time editing and processing their images, which can be both wonderful and hellish.

Before coming to India I thought a lot about the kinds of images I wanted to make here, and amazingly I’m actually making some of them. Work evolves slowly though. It’s a huge process of getting to the heart of what you want to say with images. Henri Cartier Bresson said that you have to take 10,000 pictures before you start getting anywhere, which would be about right for me. I don’t know how to classify what I’m doing now, but hopefully this experience will enable me to become fluent in different photographic styles—travel reportage, documentary, portraits, architectural, color, etc.—and help me grow in new directions.

Getting out of Ladakh has been good for me. Being confronted with new places, people and cultures keeps your vision fresh. In photography you should be engaged with your subject or else your vision is flat and it shows. There’s usually always a way to get into things, but of course some places and subjects are just inherently more interesting and photogenic than others. Ladakh is more interesting to me than Oklahoma, for example, but there’s plenty to photograph in Oklahoma, and if Oklahoma were my assignment, I’d get into it. Being open and sensitive to people and new situations is a given.

I can talk with my best friend about pictures. As former photography student he understands what I’m trying to do here. But I really don’t have other people to discuss my work with. Ideally I’d like to find a mentor…say, Bruno Barbey or Steve McCurry. Hah! But seriously, someone whose work I greatly respect and have an affinity for, and who’s much more advanced than me. Hopefully that will happen when I return home, but I still have my work cut out for me here…

Some of my favorite images come from a spontaneous emotional and/or aesthetic response to a place or situation, and without even thinking I make a picture. Sometimes it happens so quickly that I forget it happened, maybe because there was no thought process involved, but there it is. Another thing I like is getting into the middle of a slightly chaotic situation or where there’s some hive of energy, almost becoming a participant in the scene, and then shooting. In India sometimes it’s me, the foreign woman or “auntie”, that creates the scene. I get randomly mobbed by hordes of kids and love shooting while surrounded by their incredible joy and energy. Sometimes adults go a little crazy too. Everyone wants their moment of recognition and I’m usually happy to give it to them.

I ran across this quote I’d saved on my computer today (by Alex Webb maybe, I don’t remember). In any case, it resonates with me at this moment.

Photographs come from that moment in the process of cognition before the mind has analyzed meaning or the eyes design and at which the experience and the person experiencing are fully, intuitively, existentially there. Such images look like photographs, not paintings—there is a tremendous sense of stopped time, of the blinking shutter, of being alive and still there, of discovery (rather than analysis), of chance, not design, of quick emotion from an uncertain cause. Photography is at its best when it deals with the very act of seeing in itself and not with recollections in tranquility or dilettantism of design.

On semi-related note, I just read Mark Tully’s No Full Stops in India and loved this passage in which a master sculptor explains something about Indian art to Mr. Tully. A lot of this applies to how I feel about my photography too.

We believe there is a spirit in all things, and through sculpture we express in form the beauty of that spirit. The smallest unit is the atom. Ultimately they are united in form —in physical objects—but they also exist in space. Within us there is an inner space in which atoms vibrate, and these vibrations are our feelings. When we see fine art, we vibrate to it—we are moved. When we create art through the discipline of our tradition, we create forms which mirror the vibrations within us. The poet becomes the poem; the sculptor becomes the sculpture. We are making images of the best within ourselves. Ours is not a realistic art, but in our sculptures we give expression to the eternal spirit, and through symbols, to even the most subtle aspects of Hindu philosophy. Of course, it takes years to master the grammar, the discipline, of our tradition.