In Defence of Not Sharing

Over the last fifteen years I believe a quiet assumption has settled over photography, that an unshared photograph is an unfinished one. The picture isn't really ‘done’ until it's posted, captioned, and released to gather its little harvest of likes. Sharing has become the endpoint of the photographic process, the way a print once was. Except the print never asked for a display of engagement.

An argument for the opposite; some of the best photographs you will ever take are the ones nobody else will ever see, and that is not a failure of the photograph. It might even be the point of it.

When photographing for an audience, the audience gets into the viewfinder with you. Not literally, but at the moment of clicking you start pre-editing for the feed, favouring the likeable over the truely personal, the shot that explains itself over the one that needs your explanation of being there. Slowly, without ever deciding to, you stop taking the photographs that only you would care about. It's the sibling of the obligation photography I wrote about last post. That was shooting things because the scene seemed to demand it. This is shooting things because the audience seems to demand it, obligation sharing, it distorts the work just as much.

The photographs most vulnerable to this are the ones I care about most, my family and friends work. The picture of my mate laughing, badly framed in terrible light, likely drunk in a pub. The unremarkable kitchen table breakfast scene that will be a time machine in twenty years. These images are worthless to the internet and priceless to me, and the internet's metrics know it. Post one and watch it slide quietly by next to a stranger's trending sunset snap, 1 of 1 million. Actually don't do that, it could train one out of taking them at all. The algorithm doesn't censor your personal photographs, it doesn't have to. It simply deems them less interesting and that judgement quietly works its way back into what you choose to shoot.

One of my best photographs (to me) is a wonky, out of focus snap of my wife stood behind a kitchen table scowling at me for taking a picture whilst one of the dogs tries to pinch a bit of toast off the table. I have no desire to share the image with anyone, my wife doesn't like her expression and there is nothing remarkable about the composition, it's tungsten-lit on daylight film and even converting to monochrome just provides a bland palette of grey. To me none of that matters, in twenty years time I'll still remember the scowl and the toast.

I've seen the other side of this at the shop too.

When we still processed film at the shop, we had an inside view of this. Every roll that came through the lab was a customer's week, month or even year, laid out in thirty-six or so frames. We got quite good at spotting the sharers, the frame or two per roll that was clearly destined for an audience and sure enough we'd sometimes see them surface online a week later, gathering their deserved applause. But that was the thing, a roll usually only held a few of them. The rest, the vast majority of what came through our machines, was private life. Kids, dogs, kitchens, holidays that photographed like anyone's holidays. Nobody was ever going to see those frames but the person collecting the envelope, and the envelope kept getting collected. Whatever the feed suggests, most photography was never made for it and I suspect, quietly, it still isn't.

I like to think of my favourite personal photos as ‘for the shoebox of prints’ the shoebox understands something we've forgotten. A personal photograph's meaning is nostalgic and was never intended to be decided by its audience. Roland Barthes understood this in Camera Lucida. The photograph at the heart of that book, his late mother as a girl in a winter garden, is the one image he refuses to print in it. "It exists only for me," he writes, for the rest of us it would be nothing, just an ordinary picture of an unknown child. The meaning wasn't in the photograph, it was in what the photograph meant to him. Every shoebox is full of Winter Garden photographs.

Another in agreement was John Berger. He stated that the real content of a photograph is the choice behind it, that someone decided ‘this’ moment, of all moments, was worth keeping. Nothing about that choice requires a witness. An audience of one doesn't diminish it. If anything it purifies it, because a photograph taken for nobody is the only photograph entirely free of performance. It's the closest the medium gets to a private thought.

I suppose I'd put it this way: not sharing is a discipline, not a deficiency. It's the photographic equivalent of writing in a notebook rather than publishing, and nobody thinks a notebook is a failed book. Keep a body of work that answers to no one. Take the badly lit picture of the people you love. Let some rolls, some cards, some whole years of photographs exist for the audience they were always really for.

You'll know the discipline is working when you take a photograph you're genuinely pleased with and have no feeling to show anyone at all. The pictures we make to be seen tell people what we want them to think of us. The pictures we make for ourselves tell us who we are, and that conversation doesn't need an audience either.