How to see Photographs
The covid pandemic screwed with many people’s sense of smell and taste. It also made people struggle with how to see photographs.
Having talked to many street photographers, it’s also clear that it caused havoc to our hobby or profession.
A few months before the Covid lockdown hit the world I spent a week in San Francisco with Alex Webb walking the streets taking pictures.
Just as I had done for years before, I would take my camera everywhere and spend hours every day on the street.
The Covid hit and, even though I suppose I could have continued walking and photographing I , and so many street photographers, mothballed our cameras.
How to practice
After lockdown we tried to restart but it was fiendishly difficult. I mulled over why this was the case and I eventually came to this conclusion.
I had forgotten how to see photograps.
Being able to spot a scene worth investigating or anticipating how 2 dogs and a priest are going to intersect on a pavement is a skill. You don’t just have it – you have to practice it daily for weeks and months and open your eyes.
Look around a train carriage and everyone is staring at their phones.
Go for a walk on the street with your camera. Everyone is staring at their phones.
Go for a meal in a nice restaurant. They’re all hunched over their phones.
They’ve all lost the ability to be aware of their surroundings and to see.
Scared of photographing strangers ?
If you’re new to street photography and afraid of photographing strangers, start off by photographing people who are staring at their phones.
it’s a good way to practice using your vision to see photographs.
They have zero awareness of what’s going on around them.
People on their commute to work are the same.
They walk a regular route and as such they often slip into autopilot mode.
Their eyes are glazed and often have their minds elsewhere.
The 2 categories of people who have constant street smarts are the homeless and police officers (neither of which you should be photographing).
So, spending hours each week on the street is that exercise you need to be able to learn how to see photographs and over the years my eyes became perceptibly better at recognising interesting things on the street.
When I started going out again after the pandemic to photograph on the street it was as if there was a thin layer of gauze over my eyes.
My mojo was gone. I wanted to photograph buildings. And sign posts. And puddles of water. Just the sorts of things we should try and get away from as street photographers.
But slowly the skill came back – the skill to see an interesting photograph.
But it brought home to me the need to photograph frequently – ideally every day, just like playing the piano.
Just picking up your camera 3 times a year when you’re on vacations won’t help you at all.
The more you photograph, the better you get – it’s as simple as that (and if you press your shutter button a 1,000 times in a day, the Gods will roll a dice and you’ll probably get a few half decent pictures anyway).
