Reasons to Photograph

IN 1946, THE EDITORS OF GANGREL magazine asked a selection of writers to explain why they bothered writing. Out of that assignment came one of the best-known essays in the English language, George Orwell’s Why I Write.

In his typical dry, matter-of-fact style he identified four main reasons why writers write:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc…

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or […] in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed…

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose — […] Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after…

Much of what Orwell had to say about the reasons for writing holds for photography as well — at least in my case. I still remember the assignment in my first-year photojournalism class that made me into a photographer. After a semester of pretty awful classes, we were asked to write an essay about our favourite photographer. The instructor teaching the class showed us exclusively his own, rather uninspiring work, so I did not have a favourite photographer because I did not know any photographers and this photojournalism thing seemed to be about sports, car accidents, and lit portraits — none of which was a reason I went into journalism school. (Mind you, almost everybody else was there because they wanted either a) free tickets to sporting events; b) to photograph Sunshine Girl; or c) to be on TV.) I did the only thing I could think of — I went to Calgary public library.

The library had a rather decent selection of photobooks on the ground floor where I came across a book of photographs by Swiss photographer Werner Bischof. That book was a revelation. Nobody told me that I could use photography as a way to understand the world in a way that immediately spoke to me. To a 19-year-old immigrant still struggling with English, that was powerful stuff. I spent next four years on the ground floor of that library and kept taking photojournalism classes for no other reason but to have access to cheap film and a darkroom.

Years later, while devouring the work of Paul Strand on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, I came across his quote that today resonates with me more than ever: “I’ve always wanted to be aware of what’s going on around me, and I’ve wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.” I cannot imagine a better reason why one would make photographs. There is, and I think this holds for writers as well, another side to this. Recently, American photographer Matt Black whose work I admire said that, as photographers, we “have a moral obligation to publish [our] work and reach as many people as possible.” It seems to me that all of good photography we see out there comes from those two tenets: understand the world around you and engage with it in a meaningful way and help others do the same.

Photographers, being photographers, haven’t always been writing about their process and motivations in systematic ways, unlike writers, being writers, who don’t seem to be able to help themselves. As a result, much of writing about photography comes from writers, curators, sociologists, anthropologists, and even geographers such as Gillian Rose whose website visual/method/culture should be on any photographer’s reading list.

When it comes to documentary photography, much of what we gleaned from practicing photographers used to come from interviews, public appearances, lectures, and an occasional documentary. That has been changing lately. For example on Medium, publications such as Witness offer a broad range of discussions on issues in contemporary documentary practice. One of the most important contributions to those necessary discussions is Stuart Franklin’s 2016 book The Documentary Impulse.

Franklin, well-known for his work on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the photograph of the Tank Man, provided one of the best definitions of the documentary photography I ever came across when he wrote that the value of documentary photography “lies in an honest striving to describe the world around us, without overt intent to sell political ideology (propaganda) or a commodity (advertising).”

He also identifies two kinds of curiosity that drive documentary photographers. Journalistic curiosity is your basic nosiness in the best possible sense of that word — the desire to know what’s going on, what is that is unfolding in front of your eyes. The other kind of curiosity that drives us, says Franklin, is existential curiosity “which relates to seeking an understanding of one’s place in this life and how things interconnect under that large sky.”

Our curiosity, our values, ego, aesthetics, history, politics, and desire to communicate create what Franklin calls the documentary impulse — “the passion to record the moments we experience and wish to preserve, the things we witness and might want to reform, or simply the people, places or things we find remarkable. The driving factors… encompass the search for evidence, for beauty, even for therapy — and always the search to make memories immortal.”

That connection between documentary photography and memory is very much what I am interested in exploring as a part of the project along the rivers of my home. I am interested in how memories and historic events manifest themselves in the landscape and in that particular property of photographs to “bear witness to human choice being exercised in a given situation,” as John Berger wrote in his fabulous book of essays Understanding a Photograph. I am interested in it because I need to — I hope to — understand how did we get to this point in time where rampant nationalism and outright hate, bigotry and ignorance get to re-write history creating a rift between the memory, history, contemporary politics and identity, and the landscape. I want to explore, as Gerry Badger put it, “different kinds of dialogue with history to be made with photographs.” And I want to figure out how we can use photography to ask questions, provoke and encourage dialogue and reflection in a society unaccustomed to either.

And there is a lot of history to engage with— military history, ecological history, economic history — just like in the rest of Europe, sometimes there is too much of it over too little geography. But there is also much beauty and a rich contemporary life on the banks of those rivers. Small geography works in my favour here. Most of what I want to photograph is accessible if you have a pair of good hiking boots and a few dollars for commuter train tickets. Where all of this gets interesting is in discovering what is this going to look like and what is it going to be in the end.

What I hope above all else is that it follows Walker Evans’ command to all of us really: “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” ✖︎