What is the Point of Photography ?

What is the Point of Photography ?

For me it is a transference/connection to my Dad who passed few years back. He was an semi-professional portrait/wedding photographer in the 30s-40s before I came on the scene and I have a lot of his beautiful B&W prints and one day will scan and share.

He took 16mm home movies on his Revere camera and and projected with a Keystone. Still have both. I remember the wonderful smells of the equipment and projection screen.

He took stills using his Kodak Hawkeye #3 using 118 film IIRC.

He bought me my first camera in the 1970s- a Polaroid 420.

Lots of memories and pleasure for me this hobby.
 
I am glad that you got a forum, Helen!
Now shower us with images and ideas and memories ....

[repeat] but who cares!
 
It gives me a reason to go out. It gives me a third eye that is not blind. It gives me purpose to continue living however tedious.
 
raydm6 said:
For me it is a transference/connection to my Dad who passed few years back. He was an semi-professional portrait/wedding photographer in the 30s-40s before I came on the scene and I have a lot of his beautiful B&W prints and one day will scan and share.

He took 16mm home movies on his Revere camera and and projected with a Keystone. Still have both. I remember the wonderful smells of the equipment and projection screen.

He took stills using his Kodak Hawkeye #3 using 118 film IIRC.

He bought me my first camera in the 1970s- a Polaroid 420.

Lots of memories and pleasure for me this hobby.
Click to expand...

My Dad was as well a passionate amateur photographer, even in the difficult times he went through.

I can understand how you relate your photography to memories...

I remember when I was a child we sometimes drove a long way to the main city (Milan) to buy chemicals and other supplies to develop and print.
Those trips to the main city were also a kind of family event!

I still have his Dust enlarger and still use his (now mine) Rolleiflex.
 
for me, photography is a record of my existence on earth. time flies so fast and my brain often lost track of the past. by taking photos, i can look back and immerse myself back to those moments that i experienced but lost track of. i enjoy seeing the beauty of our brief (but also long) moment on earth.
 
helenhill said:
What is the point of Photography?
Click to expand...

There's no one size fits all in photography. It is a very complex language with hundreds of purposes.

For me, it is beneficial to my mental health to make photos. I just can't help but do it and when I can't, it literally depresses me.

The point... is the fact that putting a frame around something, so that transforms it into something else, just does it for me and that is enough for me.
 
"What is the Point of Photography ?"

There are many answers to that question, each correct and personalised to each individual , just like in playing music or sketching and painting...you can never get it good enough but we keep on trying for perfection .

My personal take on what is the point of Photography is it is a form of healing, photography in its many forms is a healer.
 
Aside from photography being my way to record how cities, neighborhoods, and landscapes currently appear before they are changed over time, I also think photography is our way of recording patterns which we find enjoyable.

The human brain naturally analyzes shapes and relationships of objects, light and dark, whether this is from buildings, landscapes, clouds, or people interacting with each other. Photography is our way of recording that we've noticed a particularly interesting "pattern".
 
I use photography to try and make sense out of the craziness I see around me everywhere in the world.

My viewpoint is Sagittarian - I see humor and many elements to laugh at (and enjoy) in almost everything. This I believe has kept me (reasonably) sane and functioning in an increasingly mad world, and it's what I try to put either on film or in pixels. Now and then I succeed.

As a trained architect, I tend to think in grids. A lot of the photography I've done and continue to do throughout my life has been of buildings or elements of buildings. Over the decades I've tried to train my brain and eye to keep the verticals in my images properly, well, vertical - and let the rest look after itself. Again, at times I succeed in this.

In my teens and twenties before interior design architecture seduced me into a career choice, I was a journalist-photographer for several daily newspapers. Everything I shot back then was documentary and too much of it from those early days tends towards the chocolate box - this aspect of looking at things has stayed with me into my seventies - much too much at times, it seems, but that's me.

I also record things around me at home - family members, beloved cats, my travels, friends, events I attend that amuse and inspire me.

Much of my photo archives are film but I'm slowly turning these into digital images now, sadly much of the rest of my free time in life will be spent in front of my Apple PC and scanner. But things could be worse.

Last week I was looking at color slides, still amazingly well preserved, from my first time in Bali in 1970 - amazingly those images took me back to the moment I pressed the shutter button on my Rolleiflex, what I was seeing, thinking, who I was with and talking to. Just like I had somehow slipped back in time to a day in Ubud, half a century ago. All that deja vu can be - disconcerting, but also enjoyable.

That about sums up my photography. I once jokingly described myself to a friend as an inspired hack in everything I've done in life - on due reflection I now realize there is more truth to this than I thought at the time. But again, as the French say, c'est la vie, les enfants...
 
At a fundamental level, the point of photography is to record the characteristics of light in a specific location for a specific period of time.

The original data for the light are created by analog processes. Sometimes the data spatial distribution is continuous and remains analog. Sometimes the data spatial distribution is discontinuous - then the analog signals are converted to integer estimates. In both cases a state of nature (historical, objective physical phenomena) is preserved by representing it as information.

When a photograph is made, a slice of time is captured. Unlike memories - which also attempt to preserve occurrences in time - a photograph can be immutable.

However, information about the state of nature when the shutter was open is limited. Consider a photograph of just a smiling face with tears flowing from the eyes. Is the person crying with joy? Is the smile a fleeting emotion of bittersweet recollection that is only a brief respite during a tsunami of grief? We can not count on context from such a photograph. But when the spatial information more complete (e.g. the composition includes a background of grave markers) the state of nature has contextual clues.

Before the photograph is made a person decides the content for the data by selecting a composition. Even when no thought is given to composition, a person still impacts context by their lack of purpose. An extreme case would be an automated security still camera. Where the camera was aimed, the field of view, the DOF and time of creation are deterministic. Even random choice for these parameters represents some type of decision.

More interesting are photographers' well-considered, yet subjective decisions about a photograph's composition and timing. Now the point of the photograph is to use the information from recording the characteristics of light in a specific location for a specific period of time to convey meaning. The objective information content is the means to impart subjective information content.

After the data is recorded things become complicated. The information content (objective and subjective) of all photographs is vulnerable. Human intervention can impact the point of the photograph in many ways. Cropping the image is one of the least subtle examples. Another person can easily subvert the photographer's purpose. This other person's intervention may not be malicious, but intervention represents a new source of information and can significantly affect purpose.
 
Hi Helen. Thanks for the question/thread.
I could think of this in another way, by asking myself what is it I enjoy about looking at an image contained in a rectangle on the wall. This could be a painting or a photograph. Image all the possible things that could be in that rectangle that attract ones attention and all the physical and emotional responses they could evoke.

This is the point of photography for me... to create something in that rectangle that is fun to look at, once created.
 
Not everything has to have a point.

To quote Mr. Vonnegut, “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!”.
 
For me, photography does three things:
1) I enjoy being part of the photography community.
2) It is an artistic outlet.
3) I get a chance to mess around with noisy clockworks and smelly chemicals.


Steve W
 
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