Why We Make Photographs

Why We Make Photographs

by William Lulow

Last month I wrote a piece entitled “Why Take Pictures” but forgot to mention a very important reason: to preserve a record of life! It is always great to see one of my photographs used for a purpose other than simply to view it, but at the same time, it constitutes a very important piece of evidence of someone’s or someplace’s existence at a certain time. For humans, life goes by extremely quickly and for that reason, it is necessary to try to preserve moments in time so that succeeding generations can get an idea of who someone was, or what a place was like at an earlier time. It is also a way for us to document growth. I have photographed a number of children over my long career (including my own) and, in trying to document their growth, I have always thought that the best way to do this was to use a plain background. This technique really draws attention to the subject, him or herself without any distractions:

With my own child, it was a matter of bringing her to the studio, putting a blanket down on the floor and laying a piece of no-seam paper on top of it. This was shot with my 4×5 view camera from directly above her.

Or, I made images like this one that captures my oldest granddaughter with her parents:

Then, as they get older, I try to make the photographs kind of look the same, all shot on a white or plain background in order to highlight the changes:

It is a way to see what someone looks like at various stages of life. It is also a way of documenting the change in a certain place. Here are a couple of images of the same place taken fifty years apart:

Whenever you revisit a certain place, the way you look at it or photograph it is never the same. You sometimes need to stand in a different place, or the weather is different, or the light is not the same. When you shoot in a studio, you can control the light, background and exposure so that measure of technique can serve to help document growth.

Photographer Jean Rault, Evreux, France

My good friend, French photographer and professor Jean Rault ,who has been working in France, Japan, India and the United States for over 30 years made a special project when he was a Professeur at the Maison d”artes of Evreux, his hometown. The book was entitled “Repliques”  and was published in 1988. He had students research historical postcards or images in paintings or drawings and then try to find the actual, physical points from which they were made. Each “point-of-view” was then a modern-day,  single image history of what that location became over the intervening years. Here are a couple of examples:

(Photographs used by permission from Jean Rault. Images (c)Copyright Jean Rault, 1988)

These are just a couple of instances from which one can easily discern the relevance and importance of making images like this. They serve to detail the history of a place and show how it changed over the years. It thus becomes an important document and record which is “why we make photographs.”

One of the reasons that the science and art of photography began around the same time (c.1820) in France and England is so that people could see what was called “reality.” Until people like Joseph Nicephore Niepce in France and William Henry Talbot in England figured out how to “fix” an image made by light, that is stop it from fading away using chemicals, history had to rely on painting, drawing, etching or other means of depicting the world and its changes. Add to this the work of Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre and you have a process that was really started in France. So here my friend Mr. Rault, was following in a strong tradition begun in his home country. Although these methods are rightly called “art works,” they were still depictions of the world made with an artist’s skill, point-of-view and influence. Photographs depicted the world in a much more real way. Events and places that took place in front of the camera were able to be recorded and did not need the artist’s skill with a paint brush or etching tool. Of course, someone making a photograph still had to rely on his instruments and also had to choose where to place his camera, but the images created had a much more “real” look to them. They weren’t interpretations.

Cameras themselves were not new things in the 1820s. The CAMERA OBSCURA had been invented in the 4th century BC and used extensively by painters and draftsmen to get an idea of perspective and size for their paintings or drawings. But it took until the 1800s for man to invent the method by which images could be fixed on a medium of some type. So, history got a tremendous aid with the invention of photography as all the images of President Abraham Lincoln made by Matthew Brady in the 1860s can attest. By then, the process was about 20 years old and had already gone through some major refinements.

When the honesty of the photographic process is kept sacrosanct, images can show us exactly how things looked. They become important, historical documents. With the advent of image-altering software in the digital age, it has often become difficult to ascertain if an image has been altered or if it truly represents how things actually looked. It is important to bring this up because the digital altering of images has become part of the art form today, but not necessarily of history. For the most part, we rely on photographs to show us what the world is like and how it has changed. Its value lies in its ability to record a moment or a place accurately. As a further example here is an image I made in 1977 of the nearly completed World Trade Center and the then elevated West Side Highway in lower Manhattan:

Images like this can become part of an important historical record. Photographs have a unique ability to remind us of the past and document growth.