Sugar Maple ~ Fall 2009
I try to create an emotion through a mood, an appreciation for what’s there – something people walk by every day and don’t see.
Robert Farber
I often hear people comment when looking at my work something to the effect that “I took a photograph just like that once, only yours is better.” Now I don’t mean to brag or put on airs or puff out my chest but this remark, repeated often while exhibiting my images by would be art buyers, set me thinking…Just what is the difference between a photograph as art and a snapshot. Both are made with equipment designed to capture an image on either film or on a digital sensor, both require one to look through a viewfinder, frame an image, make a decision to release the shutter, and ultimately make a printed record of the image captured. Once printed the image is an artifact, a documentary record of that which once was. The equipment need not be fancy, expensive, or high tech. One of the finest images I own was made by a homemade pin-hole camera made from a round oatmeal carton. The only meaningful variable then can only be the photographer.
If the only variable that matters is the photographer, then it stands to reason that the real variable is one’s vision, one’s ability to walk by a place and find something visually interesting. That is the difference between the everyday snapshot and the photograph. This is not meant to demean the snapshot. The entire project of George Eastman was to make the camera so common as to be available to everyone. This allowed one to document vacations, families, events and the like. But learning to see is an entirely different matter. To compose is to find order in chaos, to frame what is interesting and crop away the rest, to make visual decisions that tell a story just by looking at the image.
When I am working in the field I explore a subject from different angles, aspects, lighting, lens choice, and so on. I explore until I exhaust the subject visually. Some images work while others do not but I afford myself the opportunity to make images that work by working the subject. In a addition, my approach is to snap away photographing as much as I can in the time in which the light works. This is another distinction between the snapshot and the photograph. The snapshot is a point, shoot, document and move on. Making a photograph requires one to explore just what makes something visually interesting.
Many people are surprised when I talk about the location of some of my images. I photograph in the Southwestern United States because I love the desert but I also photograph in the Midwest because that is where I live. Many images of mine are made within a mile of my home, in my own backyard. When locals view my work they often comment that they have been right at the spot where an image was made but they never saw the picture.
I think that one of the most important aspects of being a photographer is the ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. It is the ability to see what only I see and have the need to record. If I don’t then the vision I have will be gone forever.
The Sugar Maple ~ Fall 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
