LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

To some degree, the purpose of photography is to replicate the human experience. Isn't this an impossible pursuit? If the purpose of a photograph is not to give us the experience of standing there and seeing the world with our own eyes, then what is the purpose of a photograph?

The history of photography shows that it has become easier and easier to make technically impressive photographs with every passing decade, certainly with every passing generation. Easier, perhaps, but never easy. There has always been a battle between our mental pictures and the ones we can make with light and chemicals. What if every shot you make is mistake-proof? Every shot - - recoverable, the seed of a perfect image assisted with AI. (This is not about AI, but about the artmaking process.)

One of the reasons I love the creative aspects of photography is that doing photography seduces me into a single-minded and thoroughly focused attention. In fact, without that level of immersion, I find my photographs are remote, emotionless, empty.

I mentioned a while back that I stayed with some friends who had a couple of hundred framed pieces of art on their walls. It occurred to me that they had an incredibly wide variety of styles of frames. I asked them about this. They explained that the cost of framing is so high that they get all their frames from thrift shops and other second hand stores. This is a great idea.

Call me a cynic, call me a disbeliever, call me an irascible conspiracy theorist, but I simply don't believe the numbers reported by websites like YouTube. When I see that some new and unknown YouTube influencer is reported to have a half a million views of their video, I simply don't believe it. We have no idea how Google tallies those numbers, but knowing the statistics for our websites here at LensWork, I find it hard to believe when I read the download statistics from social media websites. Something funny is going on here.

I guess I've always been a bit snootish in my attitude towards snapshots versus fine art photography. But the more I think about it, the more I've begun to question my assumptions. Snapshots are form of memory, but don't we experience that with our fine art photography? What is the difference between a snapshot and a fine art photograph?