When we are being retrospective, we tend to focus on the things that have changed: what we do now that we didn’t, and also what we did do, but don’t do any more :-) Rarely however, do we notice the elements of our photography that remain the same.
I’ve just been reviewing my latest work over the past year or so, and I’ve come to the conclusion that although there has been a shifting in what I do over the past decade, I really haven’t changed much at all.
This reminds me of the saying ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.
Image used by kind permission. Image © Michael Scandling.
I don’t think this is particularly a bad thing. Nor is my post today lamenting the lack of change in my work. Because I know in some ways it has changed. It’s just that well, there’s an integral part of what I do that I can’t escape. And that part is me.
It is, in my view, such a rare opportunity to see yourself in your own photography. Like the blind spot that is not being able to see ourselves the way our friends and family see us, we are blind most of the time to that part of our ‘art’ that is us.
I think the only way to be able to get a glimpse of ourselves in our own work, is to have been taking photos for a very long time. You need a lot of distance, and a lot of water under the bridge, with which to compare your most recent work with that of what you did perhaps when you first started out. See anything ‘familiar’ ? If you do - then that is most probably you.
I wish I still had the email I got from Michael Kenna. When he published a reprint of his Rouge book, I noticed that although the new edition was expanded with images that were shot at the time of the original publication, the inclusion of them showed signs of his future work to be at that time. When I wrote to him and said ‘I see Hokkaido in these images, before you went to Hokkaido’, he replied with a bit of poetry which I wish I could remember. It more or less said something along the lines of ‘the more we change, the more we stay the same’. Included in his email was also an early Kenna image - taken around the early 70’s. Although it was 35mm format, it had all the earmarkings of a Kenna shot - foggy, with a simplistic minimalist composition of a park somewhere in England. I could see him in this early shot so well, and yet at the time of capture, he still had to form his style.
I think now that I’ve been making images for over twenty years, I have the benefit, or opportunity to be able to see ‘me’ in my imagery - the part that has stayed the same all this time.
It is in doing so, that I think I can assume that I’ve reached the summit of where I am meant to be. With this acknowledgment, I realise that the future is perhaps mostly going to be about honing what I already have, rather than making massive changes. I think this is something one has to reach an understanding, and also an acceptance with oneself.
It is what it is, I am what I am, and this is what I do.