The Value Of Photography
by William Lulow
Note: Please pardon me while I wax a bit philosophical here!
What makes people take pictures? I have asked this question many times before, but I have been thinking about it more these days because of the many instances of shootings of children, the war in Ukraine, all the political violence in the world and just what most folks want from their lives. It often seems as though life is just lived without really much thought. For poorer folks it consists of trying to feed families and secure decent places to live. There isn’t much time or energy left for much of anything else. For many of us in the middle classes, photography can be an expressive outlet, it can serve to document people’s lives or to enrich them by providing stimulating pieces of artwork for them to look at and enjoy. But since life is really short by comparison to things in the universe, it can provide memories for those still living, long after the photographer or the maker of images has passed. And, it can provide a living for many of us who have been engaged in providing images for our clients to use for all sorts of commercial purposes.
I learned years ago, what goes into creating professional caliber images that people could use and it has been a driving influence in my life for the last 50 years or so. This past summer, I set out on a little trip to revisit some of the places I saw that many years ago to try and photograph them anew and to bring my substantial knowledge of the photographic process to those new images. The digital process, though complicated in its own right, has simplified the making of photographs greatly. Just as in anything else, once you study the science, you then have the ability to create the art. Unsurprisingly, I am a much better photographer today than I was even ten years ago.
Today, if you carry a camera phone, you become a picture taker. It becomes easy to document what goes on in your life or someone else’s because the technology is so perfect. You often do not even have to think about it. But what interests me is the motivation for making pictures in the first place. Is it just to preserve a moment in time, an action or an event? Or is the value of images more than just that? I think a photographer’s life work can tell a story of who he or she was during the time they were alive. I have often said that a portrait is more of an image of the photographer than the person being photographed, because many different people have captured the same subjects, yet each looks different. This has everything to do with the human condition itself. For my own part, I was drawn to the art form when I was about eleven years old and finally decided, in my twenties, to try to make a living at it. It hasn’t always been easy, but I have endured in the business for over forty years.
Everything and everyone changes over time. So too, images depend on when and where they were made. Landscapes change and sometimes you can stand in the same place as someone else did and still not be able to duplicate his or her images. Here are two images made 50 years apart, of the same scene:
The first one was shot in the winter of 1972, the second in the summer of 2022. For the second one, the weather was completely different. Trees and other growth make for a very different scene. Yet one knows the place was the same. Here’s another example:
Here, the weather made a difference, but the place was the same.
And yet another image made in the same place:
This is made almost from the same spot Ansel Adams visited back in 1942. The view is of the Snake River and Grand Teton peak from the Snake River Overlook in Grand Teton National Park. In the eighty years that transpired between then and now, the landscape changed quite a bit including the growth of many more trees. You can “Google” the original to see some of the differences, but they are certainly obvious and serve to highlight the point I made about each photographer seeing the same scene differently. Sometimes it’s the scene itself that changes as we all grow older.
But, the value of making these images really lies in the photographer’s own reasons for photographing things herself. In my case here, it was the feeling of re-photographing places I had been before and seen under different circumstances. Some of them were made before I really knew what I was doing photographically, so the re-visit, was done, as I said, with the addition of much more knowledge about the process and therefore more mastery of how to make my images come out closer to what I envision. So, as much as I thought I knew then, I know much more now.
But there are other reasons to value photography. It shows us what our past was like. It can serve to remind us about our world and how it can change. It can make us feel something about what we look at and who we see. Even more importantly, when we study light and lighting, it changes the way we see the world completely. Once you study lighting, you will never look at a photograph or a scene without noticing the light. So, photography has the power to alter how you actually see the world and it has been doing so since its invention in the early 1800s.
