What Are We Actually Doing Here

For about a year I have been posting small photography thoughts on Mastodon under a tag I invented for myself, #fotogedanken. Not photos. Thoughts. Someone asked me early on what the point of that was, and the answer I gave then still holds up: I care less about the single image than about the medium. What are we doing here, why are we doing it, and what does it actually do to the people looking?

Then other people started posting fotogedanken of their own, which made me very happy. The tag has turned into something better than a personal notebook - follow it and you get a steady stream of photographers thinking out loud about the medium instead of about gear, which is rarer than it should be.

Reading a year of my own back in one sitting, the same argument keeps surfacing in different disguises: photography is a practice you do for yourself, in a world that keeps insisting it is for an audience, a platform, or a purchase. Everything below is a variation on that one idea. Each section also has a longer post behind it that I will get to over the coming weeks - this one is the distillation.

The part that isn't pressing the button

Start with something I keep coming back to. Photography is the only art form where the act itself can theoretically be over in a millisecond. A painter is inside the making for hours. A musician is inside it for the length of the piece, at minimum. We can walk around for an entire afternoon and the work, the actual exposure, lasts a five hundredth of a second. Everything else - the walking, the waiting, the noticing, the editing, the sequencing, the moment where you hand the thing to somebody - sits around the act rather than being it. That is exactly why thinking about the medium is worth the time. The interesting part is almost entirely the part that is not pressing the button.

It also means photography reaches a lot further than making pictures with a camera. My son's girlfriend gave me a notebook for Christmas, a Nuuna made from recycled jeans, and it feels wonderful. It also needed work before it could compete with my current favourite, a Dingbats. I transplanted a ribbon marker out of another notebook, glued in three pen loops, built a paper pocket into the back cover. Now I only need the patience to fill the book I am currently writing in before I am allowed to start the new one. I count that as one of my fotogedanken, because people who are into photography tend to be the same people who notice the fine grain of things, who have a soft spot for analog objects even when they shoot digital and publish online, and for whom the way there is usually the point.

Amateurish is a compliment

Somewhere in the first year of putting frames around my images, someone whose work I openly admired told me they looked amateurish and gimmicky. Gimmicky is a matter of taste, fine. Amateurish I will happily take as a compliment, because it says I am doing this primarily out of affection for the medium rather than to satisfy a convention. We live in a world of photographic oversaturation. The only person who has to be happy with the result is you. If that means a frame, a filter, a round image, a deliberately blown-out sky, then you have already won.

A swipe crowd is not an audience

"Instagram is the best way to find an audience for my photography." I hear it constantly and I have doubts. I have never once watched somebody be long and thoughtful on social media. Be honest with yourself - how often does it really happen? And by long I do not mean three seconds instead of half a second. What we are dealing with is a swipe-like-swipe-swipe-like crowd, and whatever that is, it is not an audience. Not the same species of thing.

The marketers make this very legible. Every online presence I have ever run - the blog, the podcasts, the photography, back when I was still feeding a five-figure follower count on Twitter - has eventually attracted someone who wanted me to start selling my audience. Photography seems especially prone to it. The wish for an audience seems to lead directly to the error of treating monetization as the same thing as success. Requests came in via Pixelfed the other week. Nobody has yet offered to monetize my Bookwyrm profile, which is a shame. I guess I keep reading purely for fun then.

Twenty copies, given away in person

The counterweight is not to give up on being seen. It is to put the work somewhere that assumes a viewer with a spare five minutes. Erik's photo zine is the model I keep pointing at, because it stands in a long tradition of people thinking critically about photography as a form of communication and handing those thoughts to others for discussion. That practice has become rare. Most photography publishing today is either a lightly disguised invitation to buy gear or a how-to, and both of those are fine, and neither of them is a conversation.

There is a rule hiding in that which I only formulated recently, and it is uncomfortable enough that I want it in writing: if you put no effort into publishing your images, you do not get to be surprised when the audience puts no effort into thinking about what they saw. Layout is respect. A sequence is an argument. Handing somebody twenty printed pages is a different request than dropping a JPEG into a feed, and people answer the request you actually made.

So my photos exist almost exclusively in print, in a zine or a book, and even then only if you really want one. Twenty copies, maximum print run, given away in person. This year I want to go a step further and make them by hand. I genuinely do not know yet whether that is a good idea, because I love holding printed photographs about as much as I hate wrestling with modern printing technology. But I want unusual paper, and unusual paper means doing it myself.

There is more where this came from. The whole series collects under Photo Thoughts.