JPG Magazine: Stories: Photo Essay: Small but significant

Small but significant

By rick forgo

10 May 2008

"On 7 May 2008 Kevin D said:

...It is reminiscent of a few photographers who frequented the seaside towns of Wales, during the fifties, and took shots of working class families on holiday. A genre of sorts emerged, which favored the lone figure, in contrast to the family shots. Psychologically, this compounded the inherent melancholy of these 'resorts', places which offered brief respites from the drudgery of daily life, by adding the dimension of loneliness..."

This very insightful and informative comment was left on one of my recently uploaded captures, in turn providing me a bit of insight into my photography. I have been doing this for only a few years now, and have ran the typical gamut of subjects, from flowers to broken things to shiny things to tiny things, and so on, but in the past six months, a style of sorts has begun to emerge from my scattershot approach.

A lot of my photos linger on loneliness, solitude, and (literal) darkness. Empty nightime cityscapes, expansive natural landscapes for example. I have noticed now, however, that I tend to take alot of the type of shots in this story: an isolation of one (proportionally) tiny person within a land/sky/seascape taking up most of the frame.

Once I noticed this, I began to wonder what it said about me. I thought of such photos as metaphorically portraying humans as being a small but significant part of existence. I thought that perhaps these photos were expressing my desire to see humans return to a natural and sustainable way of life in which their activities did not disproportianately affect the earth. I thought that these photos may express my own feelings of helplessness and ineptness in facing the aformentioned situation. I thought alot of things.

The imortant thing here is not what I thought, but that I thought. These photos were produced innately, instinctually, with no consideration of the above social-psychological aspects, but later provided me an insight into myself. I find this very interesting.

The point of this essay is to provoke you into doing the same. Look at your photos and ask (beyond technical) questions about your motivations for expressing what you saw in a certain way. I'm not saying this is for everybody, and I'm not saying you should weigh in advance every psychological influence on the scene when you shoot, as there's no point getting bogged down into existential limbo for every frame. What I am saying is that you might learn a lot about yourself, and make viewing your photographs even more enjoyable if you look past the what, where, when, and who, and look deep at the why.