On making photos you don’t understand
Leica M262 + Zeiss 50/2
I was going over photographs from a walk the other day when I came to a strange realization. I was looking at photographs I had made, even with approval, but was haunted by the realization that I didn’t understand what they were about. Sometimes photos are obvious. The photograph of a beautiful landscape is very clearly a reverential witness to the beauty of things. But I was looking at photos that were, for lack of a better term, simply ambiguous with regard to symbolism or meaning. But they were nevertheless moving in some mysterious way that I didn’t and still do not understand. I struggle with this, mightily.
A stained cardboard box in the snow, or tattered vegetal remnants against a concrete wall are less obviously beautiful, if they are even about beauty at all. I have been trying to take the advice of a friend of mine when they told me to just shoot anything. If it catches my eye, causes me to stop and linger for a second look, I make a photograph of it. It has been a liberating process and has opened up pathways that I would have never previously explored.
In the past I have always struggled with a need to situate my “artistic” output within the architectonics of my broader worldview. Making landscape photographs couldn’t be about simply making photos of the landscape, it had to be connected to a broader critique of the broken relationship with the land in modernity and a practice of re-enchanting our experience of the land, the reintroduction of the sacred in to our experience of the earth. In this context the photographs had a clear meaning and intention. Even until relatively recently I would say that the photographs I was making still fit in to a broader worldview. From my perspective at least they have had a clear function and place within a holistic philosophical/existential framework.
I suppose that it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand them. In having the experiences and turning them in to photographs there is something at work even if I don’t understand it.