Winter Jewels IX

Winter Jewels IX
Originally uploaded by Alan Norsworthy

Sitting around the table in a Downtown Cafe after our walkabout on Saturday morning the question “ why do we photograph” came up.

I have been pondering that ever since.

Yes we can merely observe and register the un-photographed image in our minds eye where we can pull it up to see it at anytime. In doing that we have fully explored, felt, seen what was before us.

There are those who say that to stop that flow by composing and recording what we are experiencing as a physical thing, a photograph. We are denying ourselves the true pleasure of ‘being there’.

Does Susan Sontag have the answer?

In ‘On Photography’ she writes;

“In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are the grammar and more importantly the ethics of seeing”.

So do we photograph to become the author of the ‘visual code’?

One thing is for sure I think Dorothea Lange put it quite simply

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~Dorothea Lange

So maybe the answer is not quite so grandiose, maybe it is more simple.

We photograph to expand our vision, to see what normally is not seen and share that with the world at large....