Appearances and Photography

I was just looking at some pictures online, and I was finding it strange how much a medium that I find marvelously useful when applied to people is really almost useless for me for places. They make lovely artwork, but it doesn't build any sort of connection unless there are people there to connect it to some experience of a person. Places on their own seem somewhat irrelevant, although pretty. Places are made significant when something has happened there, when there's some emotion/story/experience to connect to them. Somehow being pretty isn't enough: it isn't a sufficient goal in and of itself. Appearance just doesn't seem like a goal: it's a means to an end for most people, usually attention and affection. For a building, an attractive appearance is there to make its inhabitants/users satisfied and comfortable, and to make it fit with its environment. But there, to some extent, it is attractiveness so as not to create an eyesore as often as it is attractiveness for the sake of creating something pretty. And nature can be appreciated as G-d's creation, but well- it's hard to do that via a photograph. It can be lovely art: but photos so often don't feel like they have a meaning. Once there is a center of focus in the photo, it changes, whether that's a person or an object. But scenery tends to lack focus, and is generally far more impressive in real life than in a captured image. It's one reason I've never taken many pictures of scenery: it doesn't have the same feeling of awe as the real thing, usually. I don't know how to capture that on film. Maybe it's a lack in my skill or artistry, I hardly have advanced training, or in fact, almost any training: one semester of photography in high school doesn't count for much.

However I realize that if/when I hear the stories that the photos are connected to: where they were taken, what was going on, why they were taken, I'll feel entirely differently about the exact same images. It leads me to think that photos make much better props than solo items. For a milestone birthday, my Mom took a bunch of my (paternal) grandmother's old photographs, put them in a photo album, and had my grandmother tell her about each picture and tape recorded her talking, and then wrote that in the album. It seems like one of the best ways to do such a thing, or at least put captions on the photos/some of them. (My photo albums are, admittedly, caption-less, but I'm hoping to change that at some point in the nearish future. I of course also have a number of photos to put into them, but I'm out of photo corners. I really should get more of those, since I'm starting to have a considerable backlog of photos.) Photos in these contexts (aka, not as displayed explicitly as artwork) are supplementary materials, I guess, much as I enjoy them.

Appearances and Photography

I was just looking at some pictures online, and I was finding it strange how much a medium that I find marvelously useful when applied to people is really almost useless for me for places. They make lovely artwork, but it doesn't build any sort of connection unless there are people there to connect it to some experience of a person. Places on their own seem somewhat irrelevant, although pretty. Places are made significant when something has happened there, when there's some emotion/story/experience to connect to them. Somehow being pretty isn't enough: it isn't a sufficient goal in and of itself. Appearance just doesn't seem like a goal: it's a means to an end for most people, usually attention and affection. For a building, an attractive appearance is there to make its inhabitants/users satisfied and comfortable, and to make it fit with its environment. But there, to some extent, it is attractiveness so as not to create an eyesore as often as it is attractiveness for the sake of creating something pretty. And nature can be appreciated as G-d's creation, but well- it's hard to do that via a photograph. It can be lovely art: but photos so often don't feel like they have a meaning. Once there is a center of focus in the photo, it changes, whether that's a person or an object. But scenery tends to lack focus, and is generally far more impressive in real life than in a captured image. It's one reason I've never taken many pictures of scenery: it doesn't have the same feeling of awe as the real thing, usually. I don't know how to capture that on film. Maybe it's a lack in my skill or artistry, I hardly have advanced training, or in fact, almost any training: one semester of photography in high school doesn't count for much.

However I realize that if/when I hear the stories that the photos are connected to: where they were taken, what was going on, why they were taken, I'll feel entirely differently about the exact same images. It leads me to think that photos make much better props than solo items. For a milestone birthday, my Mom took a bunch of my (paternal) grandmother's old photographs, put them in a photo album, and had my grandmother tell her about each picture and tape recorded her talking, and then wrote that in the album. It seems like one of the best ways to do such a thing, or at least put captions on the photos/some of them. (My photo albums are, admittedly, caption-less, but I'm hoping to change that at some point in the nearish future. I of course also have a number of photos to put into them, but I'm out of photo corners. I really should get more of those, since I'm starting to have a considerable backlog of photos.) Photos in these contexts (aka, not as displayed explicitly as artwork) are supplementary materials, I guess, much as I enjoy them.