I can only partially agree with this. Sure, there is a lot of magic to be found in seeing people in new ways. In fact, it’s one of the things I love being able to do, whether through photography or another method, however, sometimes seeing something you already know is really important too. If photography never captured what we already know, we would miss out on a lot of memories. I think there is a certain important magic in seeing something or someone we know in an image and having it transport us back in time to when the picture was taken. The magic that can be found in memory is a great power itself, and it would be a shame if this were excluded or lost.
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As long as we still take risks, go on adventures and discover the unknown, there is absolutely nothing wrong with reminding ourselves of the things we already know once in awhile, lest we forget.
“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” Duane Michals
The whole concept of imagination has always been really important to me, and I do believe that sometimes the internal dialogue an image spawns can speak volumes more than the picture alone. Pictures come to life when someone adds their own details, ideas, fantasies and stories to them. In fact, I think it is probably impossible for someone to look at a photo and see absolutely nothing more than what was captured with the camera, and if this ever did happen, I would consider it to be a sort of great loss. One of the great things about photography is its ability to evoke thought and emotions from people, and it is not images alone that cause these effects, but rather, they come into existence when someone assigns their own meaning to a photograph and creates a space for it in their imagination. The world is multi-dimensional, and I believe that imagination is a much larger space than the physical world could ever take up. What a flat and boring world it would be without the intangible dimensions we add to our lives and the world around us.
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“Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer—and often the supreme disappointment.” ~Ansel Adams
I find it somewhat surprising that Ansel Adams said this, because I think his work is absolutely beautiful, but I completely understand what he means. One of the first things I tried to do in photography was capture landscapes, and they have almost never turned out how I wanted them to or how I remembered them (and this still happens to me). It seems like taking landscape photos should be such a simple and natural thing, but it is a lot harder that one would imagine. I guess it is a little comforting to know that even the best share this problem- that it is not my own unique failure- but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you find out that amazing memory of a scene you have didn’t translate into the photograph you were hoping it would.
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