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:
- Thank you Ray @ Mitigating Chaos for sharing this essay. Loved it! Much obliged.
- Photo via Pexels: Nikita Pishchugin
