Photography; How It Influences And Impacts Me

Cultural Theorist, Stuart Hall once said that “It is a requirement of intellectuals to speak a kind of truth... Maybe not truth with a capital T, but anyway some kind of truth... The best truth they can discover—to speak that truth to power” I could not find a quote truer, to describe how photography makes me feel. How through photography you can gauge the essence and sole of a person, whether it be landscape portrait or abstract, etc. Photography, for me, means delving deep into the recesses of your brain and pulling on the spark that makes you tick. Photography can say so much without saying anything at all, and sometimes leaves the viewer having to decipher a meaning for themselves, within that still frame. 

On a personal level photography has been a way for me to capture all the things I find beautiful in the world, and either share that to a wider audience or keep it for myself—A little piece of beauty meant for no one else but me, a token of that time and place and sometimes people. As a film major, I cannot love film without photography. Without it there would be no film, thousands of pictures put together to illicit the visual movement you get with still images. Film and Photography, the better you get with one the more you can do with the other. The more you will be able to express yourself and get other people to understand what you are trying to say through your images. 

But photography isn’t always as melodramatic as I just described. In Marvin Heiferman's 2012 book Photography Changes Everything, what he says about photography is "Photographs don't only show us thing, they do things,. They engage us optically neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, physically...they promote ideas, embed values and shape public opinion"(Heiferman, p. 16). It can also be so simple, the everyday family pictures important, life events, pictures of your loved ones, little things you find interesting and that is still photography—it means something to you and illicit emotions from your loved ones. I think those pictures, more than anything, are the ones we show the most. When you take a good picture, you want to show everybody, regardless of what a critique might think, you love it and know others will too because it has meaning to you besides getting the framing correct or the right lens or your subject perfectly lit, or the right ISO etc.  

That is what photography is, an art form that can be for the everyday consumer to post on Instagram or a photographer in a contemporary museum showing their series. Whatever the medium they may use, one truth still prevails, their capital T truth, whatever that may be.