Me too: “I’ve photographed the same people, places, and kinds of light repeatedly, for many years.”

Posted on by Live & Learn

As an obsessed amateur photographer […] I scrolled through my own collection of photographs. I have roughly ten thousand stored in Adobe Lightroom (the program I use to edit my photos), and thousands more squirrelled away on various hard drives and cloud services. I also have boxes of prints and binders of film negatives here and there. Although I’ve been photographing seriously since my twenties, the pace of my production has increased markedly since I’ve had kids; I’m now adding a little more than two thousand pictures a year to my archive. This suggests that, by the time I’m eighty, I’ll have about a hundred thousand photos in my hoard—three times as many as are held by the Museum of Modern Art. […]

I’m no Sally Mann or Steve McCurry, and yet I’m amassing an expansive visual account of my life. My pictures are well considered, and made with fancy equipment, and even with some imaginative and physical effort—it’s not so easy to photograph a water-gun fight in the pool!—but they are fundamentally ordinary. Photographs don’t have to be art: in a recent book, the critic Nathan Jurgenson explored the rise of “social photos”—the immediately sharable dressing-room selfies, appetizer snapshots, and view-from-the-hotel-balcony landscapes that aren’t meant to be art works but are, instead, “about developing and conveying your view, your experience, your imagination in the now.” But, even though I share some of my photos with family and friends, they aren’t social. They’re made for broadly artistic reasons, even though they’re just everyday photographs.[…]

So, by taking photographs, I’ve found out what the world looks like. I imagine that even people with keen eyesight might experience something similar. Photographs, even mundane ones, pause and magnify. They let us look, and look, and look at what our roving eyes pass over. And we often pass over everyday things—which is why it can be fascinating to find out what your coffee mug, or your cat, or your own face looks like at just the right time of day. […]

Although I have thousands and thousands of photos, my life doesn’t encompass thousands and thousands of people and places. The result is that I’ve photographed the same people, places, and kinds of light repeatedly, for many years. Taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence. Every evening, on the way home from work, I pass the same red-and-white fire hydrant, which is set into some reedy bushes on a little promontory overlooking a harbor. I often stop to take a picture of it: its red registers as warmer in summer and cooler in winter, and its white adopts the yellow of scorched grass in late summer and fall. People’s faces also change with the seasons: photographing my family on the lawn can be difficult in summertime, because the strong light reflecting off the grass can give their complexions a greenish cast, lessened only at what photographers call “golden hour”—that time in the late afternoon when the sun casts an amber glow. Warm or cold, green or yellow, and bluish-white in winter: these sorts of ambient colors change cyclically, through all four seasons. […]

All of which is to say that, no, your great-great-grandchildren won’t care about your photographs (or much else that you do); no, it isn’t entirely sensible to take thousands of pictures of your life (or to undertake many of the projects that captivate us); and, no, you’re not likely to wring transcendence out of the mundane on a regular basis. You can, however, learn something about yourself and your world by doing or attempting to do these things. Even amateur hour becomes golden hour, sometimes.

— Joshua Rothman, from “What Can You Learn from Photographing Your Life? Pictures of the mundane can capture much more“ (The New Yorker, October 22, 2024).

Notes:

38 thoughts on “Me too: “I’ve photographed the same people, places, and kinds of light repeatedly, for many years.””

  3. This is a beautiful perspective on how the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Love this , DK. Thanks.

  4. It’s hard not to agree with Joshua Rothman. At least for me. I think I’ve been living with the camera for over 20 years. I agree almost with him, but what I can add something to Rothman is that when you are together with the camera for a long time, your own eyes become like cameras. You catch moments, objects, light, colours before anyone else, and even when someone is talking to you, you suddenly notice the colours behind the person… Like a decor or a sky moment… Because the main goal from the beginning is to capture moments, like writing in a diary… Very nice article dear David, thank you for sharing, Love, nia

      1. Welcome dear David, it is so nice to know this, you know this is my second language and at the beginning I wasn’t as Today… Today I thought of this, of course reading English books is another part in my life but especially being in your blog and reading your post It has always carried me forward, I learn a lot, I am inspired, this is a blog where all the beauties are collected.. Thank you, Love, nia

          1. One day I want to write (or) translate my own book in English. I would be so happy… But still I am on the way.

  6. May I add something to this excellent article? When my eyesight got so bad and my hands couldn‘t hold the heavy Canon camera any more and at a difficult angle, when I started only taking pics with my smartphone, I also realised that my eyes and brain saw the photo as such (as a tiny work of art) far earlier than I was able to take that photo. Then, at home, when I looked at the pics on the laptop, it became evident, what my inner eye, my heart, saw already hours before…. so it‘s more of a visual diary for the initiated (mostly me) and it explains in some minor way why my badly made photos still create an interest in the viewer.
    And yes, 2k pics per year, that‘s NADA!

    1. Beautiful Kiki! And not sure if you read the entire article but he is Legally Blind: “Actually, there is one sense in which the photos are meant to be useful in “the now.” I’m legally blind; my vision is good enough for many things, but bad enough that I can’t drive. Even with glasses, I live in a bit of a blur. I’ve travelled to many places without quite seeing them, and known many people without quite knowing their faces”

      2. Have read the entire article now. Can only say that I am on the same page as him. And I realised that – apart from hundreds of novels of all kinds, my best loved books are photobooks with themes like cooking (never for recipes), gardens, nature (all of Andy Goldsworthy), great places / regions we lived in or loved very much, and silly ones like ‚Dogs hanging out of car windows‘ et al….. which probably doesn‘t say much about my ‚art‘ but my hunger for beauty of all things. Thanks for pointing that article out again for me. Illuminating.

  9. We expect photographs to be arty. But there are many ways of being arty.
    We understand the idea of a visual diary but that’s personal and doesn’t need to be published. In times of social media people publish everything that would rather stay personal. We are polluting our world with pictures nobody wants to look at.
    The Fab Four of Cley
    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

      1. OMG – I’m glad I don’t use ‘that’ space. My pics only get loaded on private TB discs where they stay, I’m paying for no cloud services and don’t intend to…. that’s horrifying news (or rather, not so news, as I read about it before, but not in much detail).

  11. Wow. I found myself rushing through the passage to see if you wrote this Dave. You could have. Especially the part about “taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence”. So many people ask me why I return day after day after day, to the same spot. That explains it, I guess.

    Loving the content this week. Even if I’m missing that Wednesday camel guy….

  12. This was a beautiful read, thank you Ray & DK.

    “Taking pictures of the same things over and over can emphasize the rhythms of existence.” Yes, everything constant, except time. There’s one specific tree I have loved you over 1000 takes of. Only thing different is time and date…

    And loved his description of the different light of the day and its hue on the faces.

    About family photos, dad took lots of photos when we were little. I would take his films to the guy to develop, then go back in a couple of days to pick up the photos with the negatives. Didn’t appreciate the photos back then. Our children, his grandkids, have recently showed crazy interest in our old family photos. Especially my youngest kid, Layla. She just wants to see mommy when she was her age. This makes my dad very happy and proud, of his massive collection.

Leave a Reply