Are you creating or collecting?

As photographers we face many choices in pursuit of our art, some will be quite obvious -  location, lens, shutter speed - others may be more subtle and perhaps are even hidden away in our subconsciousness. Perhaps at the very heart of the matter is why we have chosen to take photographs at all – are we collecting or creating?

Our reason for taking photographs will have started somewhere and for me my journey into photography started more years ago than I care to remember and was, with the lens of hindsight, simply about recording images of the trains that I loved as a child. Armed with my first SLR camera and some black and white film I started to take photographs at my local station. The results are most kindly described as “variable” but the sense of satisfaction when a “rare bird” was captured on celluloid was immense. I could share my rare capture, boasting to my enthusiast friends about the latest addition to my collection. The quality of the image was almost irrelevant as the beast had been snared.

Fast forward some 40+ years and I’m still taking images of railways and in my collection, I have managed to amass over 25,000 images. As I look back, I have come to realise that the images I enjoy most and still look at from time to time are the ones that are far more than a snapshot at a station or by the lineside. They are images that evoke a memory of a place and time and tell more of a story about what I witnessed. They are “about” and not “of” the railway. They often evoke a positive response from friends who are neither interested in nor know anything about railways.

In the parallel world of my landscape photography, a little older and hopefully wiser, I find myself asking why am I taking images? Am I collecting nice images of beautiful places or is there something more…..? Without wishing to pontificate or over analyse I would like to think that I am trying to create images that tell my story and share my perspective on a time and a place that is important to me. I am creating images that are special to me – if others like them that is a bonus. I am writing this in the Italian Dolomites, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There is outstanding natural beauty all around me and it would be easy to stand in the same place as thousands of others and take the picture postcard image that sits before me. I watch with mild amusement as other tourists stand in a spot where the ground has been worn away by those taking a selfie or two that will very soon grace the world of social media and just as quickly be consigned to the digital dustbin that consumes so many images in our throw away world.

To create an image that is unique to me I need to use the skills I have learned about my equipment over the years, but this is surely a given. Once we have mastered our tools then we are free to engage with our surroundings, breath in the clear mountain air, embrace the tranquillity that envelopes us and consider how we can create an image of this special place. Creation has vision, intent and purpose, it is a process during which we bring our vision into existence perhaps initially only as a digital file but finally in the physical form of a print.

Vision, intention and purpose require us to make choices about how we will frame our subject, what we will choose to show a viewer and what we will leave to the imagination. We can choose if we wish to convey a sense of stillness or movement and select our shutter speed accordingly. How might we use depth of field to isolate our subject or render the whole scene crisply? All of these choices are part of our creative process and none of these steps are of as much consequence if we simply seek to snap an image of a scene for our collection. I find myself asking what is the point of watching an express train zoom past me and freeze the action? Perhaps if I am simply collecting then pin sharp works but if my image is to create a sense of what it was like being there then surely I need to include some movement? Collectors are like the squirrel in our garden who never seems to know when he has enough nuts and quite often forgets where some of them are! The extra food will be forgotten about and over time will just rot away – the effort expended in collecting will have been wasted and have served no purpose. Something we have created will however call us back to view again and again, reminding us of a time and a place that was special to us. Personally, I would rather see a few excellent images created and crafted of something rather ordinary than scores of average images of somewhere extraordinary. So, are you a collector or a creator in your photography?

Of course, all definitions of this nature are somewhat arbitrary and often overly simplistic. Can a single image ever tell a whole story? In my experience it rarely can – great photo journalism can and has created many immensely powerful single images, but these are exceptions and in the landscape they seem even harder to create. So ironically, I find myself musing which of the images I have created whilst in the Dolomites I will add to a small collection that tell my story of this wonderful week in this special place. I guess I have been creating a collection!