The Want to photograph

What's the point of photographing anything anymore? The Eiffel Tower is photographed thousands of times a day. Every scenic layby in Snowdonia has been documented in every season, every light, from every angle, and the results are a search away. What could your photograph possibly add?

The honest answer is, often nothing, and I think photographers should be more comfortable saying so.

I found myself thinking about this on a recent trip hiking in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia. I enjoy a good walk through proper scenery but I've stopped feeling obliged to bring a camera, and the truth behind that decision, landscape photography isn't my bag. When I carry a camera into the hills anyway, something unwelcome happens. I stop looking at the view and start metering it. I find myself thinking about composition, foreground interest, whether the light will hold, all the machinery of making a decent photograph for a genre I don't actually care about shooting. The camera becomes a burden twice over, once on the shoulder strap and once on the attention. Meanwhile, a dozen people up the mountain are photographing the same view, better than I would, because they *want* to.

That want is the whole point.

There's a model of photography that runs on obligation. It says ‘this is beautiful, therefore I should photograph it.’ It's the logic that has people grinding out sunset shots they'll never look at again, dutifully recording every viewpoint because the viewpoint seemed to demand it. Photography by obligation produces the most joyless pictures in the world, and it produces joyless photographers too, half-absent from the places they've travelled to see.

None of this is a new complaint. Susan Sontag diagnosed it back in 1977, noting how travel and photography had fused to the point where photographing a place had become a way of certifying you'd been there, and how the certifying quietly replaced the seeing. She distrusted the camera for it, right down to its hunting vocabulary of loading, aiming and shooting. John Berger, writing around the same time, was more generous. For him a photograph's real content was the choice behind it, the fact that someone decided this moment, of all moments, was worth keeping. Between the two of them sits the question I am circling: the camera can either absent you from an experience or anchor you in it, and what tips the balance isn't the scene, but the want.

The alternative is what I've come to call the want to photograph. It doesn't ask whether the scene is worthy. It asks whether the subject activates your interest, and the answer is personal. Mine is people. Portraits, street, social documentary, family & friends, the small theatre of human behaviour. Put me in a foreign city or an old market and the camera in my hands makes me feel more present, not less. I'm hunting. I'm watching for gestures, exchanges, the trader mid-haggle, the faces in the queue… for want of better examples. The looking-for-scenes isn't a distraction from the experience, it is the experience. That same camera, on that same trip, would be dead weight at a scenic overlook an hour later.

I'd guess the hikers with cameras feel exactly the same pull, just aimed elsewhere. The ridgeline does for them what people do for me. Their landscape work will be far more interesting than mine and my market photographs could possibly be more so than theirs, and this is precisely as it should be. The worst photographs come from people shooting outside their want, out of duty to a location.

The archive doesn't need your photograph of the famous view, but it never did. A photograph was never really a document of the scene, it was always a record of an encounter, of the fact that a particular eye met a particular subject and something happened. When the want is present, that encounter is real and the photograph carries it. When the want is absent, you're just adding a slightly worse copy to a pile of better ones. The countless other people through time who have photographed the view for you aren't a threat to your photography. They're a liberation. They've freed you to save your seeing for the subjects that actually interest you.

So the next time you're heading out, ask the question, not "will there be things worth photographing?" - there always will be, but instead “will there be things I want to photograph?” If the answer is yes, bring the camera and hunt happily. If the answer is no, leave it and enjoy the view with both eyes. The photograph you don't take, of a subject you didn't care about, costs the world nothing at all.