“I am past taking pictures for the sake of seeing how things look in a photograph”

Those aren’t my words: I’ve ripped that title straight out of a passage from Sally Mann’s autobiography. Here’s the full quote:

“In general, I am past taking pictures for the sake of seeing how things look in a photograph, although sometimes, for fun, I still do that. These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept.”
— Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (LITTLE, BROWN A) by Sally Mann

But I can’t think of a more insightful, concise, and relevant description of the photographic journey. That paragraph reads almost like a summarized timeline of my own experience, from the first second I picked up a camera, right up to the present day.

In the car. Always in the car.

As a kid, the initial thrill of capturing a moment was entirely based on seeing how things looked in a photograph. I’d point at something without any foreknowledge of the image to come, beyond what I saw in front of me. I trusted the machine which, for my younger sister and I at the time, was a Kodak Instamatic—as blunt and rudimentary as it gets. Trust was our only option.

Things didn’t change much once I eventually upgraded to a more “serious” camera, many years later. To move beyond the machine, I first needed to learn how to translate, to learn control. Why were those backgrounds sometimes blurred, but not always? How could I freeze motion when I needed to? I knew nothing of optics or exposure or shutter speed. I remember using a longer lens for the first time and seeing tons of bokeh on an f8 shot—suddenly understanding the impact of focal length (and distance to subject) on depth of field.

And yet wielding control, understanding how to shape an image, only led to an enhanced version of seeing how things looked. Stage 2, so to speak. I wanted to flex these newfound muscles, on anything I could find. I got drunk on it, this ability to remake the world one frame at a time. Only later did I feel a need to introduce intent.

But intent, it turns out, was the true beginning.

…

I sometimes wonder about the impact computational photography will have on the next wave of photographers. Will kids raised on iPhones ever question the physics behind images, if physics are barely a factor anymore? Perhaps not. And it probably doesn’t matter. Maybe the journey from one stage to the next will be shorter for them.

The quest, however, will remain.
We’re human. We long to understand.

In every century.