I used to think of photography as a minor art. In comparison to music or literature, my all-time beloved ones, it appeared to me that photography granted a lower degree of choice to the artist, and was, thus, not that praiseworthy. It made me think of the old joke of the Mexican guy who only drank water when it rained, because he was too lazy to get up and get water by himself.
I wasn’t even sure that photography could be considered seriously as an art, but rather a modern way to make the most of our hunger for images, creating a cult of personality for guys that in fact were only masters in serendipity (my underlying thought: “yeah, the picture of the cat catching a seagull in the air is funny, but, if you think it twice, all the merit goes to the cat and the seagull. If someone hangs around taking thousands and thousands of pictures all the day, then finding something that “makes sense” is only a matter of time. A writer or a film maker would have created the cat, the seagull and their relation all out of the blue, while the photographer does not create anything new, but just “cages” what he finds).
As it happens very often, such radical and sharp judgments were perhaps hiding an inability to understand, maybe even some complex for not being able to see what the others seemed to find so pleasant.
Photography is still far from being my favorite form of art, but I do have learned to appreciate it better, I think. I’ve said it a thousand times in this blog, I consider myself more verbal than visual, and more analytic than synthetic; maybe that’s why I’m naturally inclined to arts that involve some kind of narration, like literature, films or music. OK, a picture can tell a story too, but I don’t think it is its strongest point; time is the rough material for any story, and time in the picture is created by using the composition, the journey that the eye makes through the sheet; such journey is compressed into only a few seconds, while the storyteller or the musician have more time to arrange the elements, can play with repetitions and other resources, etc.
Another important aspect in which I have changed my mind is that I now acknowledge that a picture can be personal. The commercial hype has made a sort of a cliché of it, but it wasn’t until quite recently that I actually saw it. And by personal I mean really personal, not only because of the huge but limited range of possibilities offered by tech to vary exposure, light, etc.
In fact, it is quite funny how the old adagio is true: when one makes a portrait, in fact one portraits oneself. Because we can only focus on what is important to us, the image “filters” our way of seeing things. I once heard that the Aramaic root of the word “eye” is the same as in “light”, intending to mean that human eye is not a receptor but a projector. Other peoples (many of which do not know photography 
) have also shared this conception: that we produce our world rather than receiving it (not to mention modern brain science, neuro-linguistic programming and the like). I remember one case that particularly struck me with this impression.
There is a friend of mine who is a “serious amateur” photographer. He has made a series of pictures of my parents, and in all of them, it struck me that my parents seemed older than what they are (well, let’s put it subjectively: older than the way in which I usually see them). Unconsciously, whenever he pictures them, his mind catches the “oldest” features and rejects other moments, like smiles, moments of kindness, etc. His pictures, to me, revealed a series of unexpected traumas and problems in his relations to my parents, to my parents’ generation, maybe.
It is funny because he also took a picture of me in my house once and on it, my face seemed to me like my reflection in a mirror, just in the way that I see myself, without the least distortion; we agree in our conceptions about each other and ourselves, that’s why we are friends, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
But, on the other hand, the picture was taken in my living room, but I had to watch it attentively to discover my living room in that palace of spaciousness; evidently, my friend had liked my house a lot.
Those are the things that make you wonder: wouldn’t be a good idea to use photography as psychoanalysis, or as a lie detector?
If you are a lover of photography (and most of people is), maybe you’ll find that many of my assertions here are heresies. Please don’t be afraid to drop by and let me know. Do you practice photography, too? Who are your heroes?
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The magic of journaling
Nacho and the primal forces
The key, if you ask me…
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