This is probably going to be a sort of “thinking out loud” post, so forgive me if I’m sharing some half-formulated thoughts. I may even have to take back some of what I write afterwards! It is complicated. (Slightly revised on 8/14/11)

This afternoon I was reading an article about a photographer who produces some excellent and compelling work that I like quite a bit. The photographer’s identity is not important in the context of what I’ll write, since the person’s story only served to remind me of many similar stories I have read elsewhere regarding quite a few other photographers. Aside from the commentary on this person’s wonderful photographs, there were two other threads I noticed in the article – and I recognized both of them from a lot of other writing by and about photographers that I’ve seen, specifically about landscape/nature photographers.

First, I noticed that there was almost as much discussion about the circumstances in which the photographer works as there was about the photography itself – and the circumstances seemed quite dramatic. (It seems curious to me that photographers are often more interested in writing about and readers more interested in these circumstances than in the actual photographs, but that is something for another post…) There were stories of working in freezing cold with the risk of frostbite, of traveling to wild and seemingly dangerous places, and of encountering scary and threatening circumstances, working alone, coupled with an impression that the photographer was unable to resist the call to “risk it all” for “the shot.” It all sounds quite dramatic and even dangerous! That, however, is going to be a subject for a future post.

The second thing that caught my attention was a claim that the photographer had imagined a specific shot and then had gone to a certain place and spent a week waiting for that shot. The photograph that was the result of these efforts is, indeed, a very wonderful photograph and one that I find quite compelling. But from my own experience in photographing similar subjects in similar places and circumstances, the claim of seeing the image before arriving and then waiting for exactly the imagined image to appear didn’t quite add up, especially given the ephemeral nature of the effects and conditions that make the image in question so powerful.

It is this second issue that I’m interested in exploring a bit right now – the question of whether we simply capture the image we saw in our mind’s eye before arriving on the scene, or perhaps do something a lot more complex and, I think, much more intuitive and instantaneous. Do we arrive on the scene and wait for the thing we imagined to happen, or do we arrive on the scene and find a way to photograph what we find there? Or, what is the balance between this opposite poles? Continue reading How Do We Really Shoot? →