This past week I’ve been reminiscing on my recent trip to Argentina’s Puna region, that I have been photographing now for close on to a decade.
It was interesting hearing the group’s opinion about the landscape. The biggest impression I heard from them was of the variety of different landscapes that they saw. For instance, we visited a really beautiful sand dune complex on one morning which yielded some very nice new images (if my films turn out to be as good as I hope they are).
It was a reminder to me that my portfolios of what I end up showing from my travels are always going to be a subset of what I encountered. No matter how hard I work at trying to capture what I’m seeing, the final results that I publish will always be a skimming of the surface of what I saw.
There is a natural process of reduction: first we filter down our travels by choosing not to photograph certain scenes. Then we go through a further refinement or reduction by reducing down the set of images we shot to the ones we think are decent. In the process of working towards showing others our best work, we omit images because they fall short in some way. Either the compositions are weak or the light is not good. Either way, we inevitably reduce and reduce what we encountered into a very small subset that simply cannot convey what was encountered and experienced.
Then there is sylistic reduction. In an effort to make the work more cohesive, sometimes this may result in collecting images that are more focussed on working together as a set, rather than being a full document of what was there. In fact, when I think about this more, I have a strong feeling that tight portfolios are at odds with documentary photography, as my set of images from my visit to the Puna in 2022 may convey:
In the above set I more or less reduced down a 10-day tour to a few key locations. There were many ‘documentary’ shots that I took, that would have weakened the final set in some way, either by subject dilution, or by throwing too much contrast and the viewers attention in a direction I would not wish to take them. I’m drawn to a stylistic motif in the final set above, but this bears no relation to the variety of scenery that was actually presented with. When I consider my portfolios over the past few years, it is clear to me that I have not been interested in documenting a landscape for a very long time now.
Yes, there is much more to shoot in the Puna. Yes, there is little room for variance in my portfolio above. I know this to be true. I cannot do both so one has to be sacrificed to aid the other. It’s just that one has to weigh up which is most important. Do you focus your final output on documenting what one saw, and risk losing a sense of stylistic sensibility to the work? Or does one focus on conveying a tight style, but do so at the risk of abandoning all the variety one saw of a place?
The choice is ultimately a personal one for each of us, and there is no right or wrong. Just a personal preference for one over the other. But this does assume that you’ve realised at some point that there is conflict at play here. You cannot have both.
So perhaps this is something that you should ask yourself about your photography:
“what is it that I am trying to do?
Are you trying to work towards finding and honing a sense of individualistic style in your work? Or are you more interested in trying to document all that you experienced?
I have a very strong feeling that both cannot exist together in a portfolio. If they do, then I would expect compromise to feature largely in the final work. Which would ultimately weaken the final output.
So which is it for you? I know for me that I am more interested in developing a style in my work, and for that reason, any hope of documenting all that I saw, was abandoned a long time ago.
But that’s just me. What about you?