The moment something catches my eye, I feel two impulses: look at it, and make sure I can keep a record of it. The phone comes out. I take the picture. I check it. Maybe I take another.
I tell myself I’m doing it so I’ll remember. But I probably won’t. Like the several thousand other shots locked up in the cloud, it may not see daylight again for years. Maybe never.
Another moment comes along down the road, and it happens again. The camera swings up. Later, at the end of another day ticking down my ever-so-precious time away, I reflect that I’ve spent most of the day looking at the back of a screen. Not taking in what was actually there, but spending most of my energy snapping a moment I probably won’t remember, and won’t look at again.
It’s a small habit, and an understandable one. We want to hold on to good things. But it sits alongside another habit: turning time into something to get through. The next meeting, the next task, the next place on the list. It’s easy to bring that pace on holiday. See the sight. Take the picture. Move along.
It isn’t only the camera. Most of us have got used to living at a pace where something is always waiting: a message, a deadline, a delivery slot, somebody asking where we are. Work has crept into the hours around work, and the phone makes sure the small gaps in the day don’t stay empty for long. Even rest becomes something to optimise. We arrive on holiday with a list, a charger and the feeling we ought to make the most of every minute. Then we find ourselves hurrying through the very thing we saved our leave for.
We’re good at carrying that logic into our free time. We plan the day, make the most of the trip, get the evidence, and come home with something to show for it. Even a hobby can become another measure of whether we’re doing well.
Photography can be caught up in that. We want a good picture. We want to know what we’re doing. We want to come home with something worth keeping. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But what if the picture isn’t the only thing photography gives us?
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We take the picture because we want to remember. Then, somehow, we leave the remembering to the picture.
At every turn, another view to collect. The camera becomes a photocopier: click, check, next. We come home with hundreds of images and, when someone asks what we did, find ourselves scrolling through them for an answer. We’ve recorded the holiday. That doesn’t always mean we’ve taken it in.
Memory isn’t an inventory. We don’t need to keep all 48 things we saw. We want a handful of good stories. The camera can help us keep them, if we give ourselves time to work out which moments are worth keeping.
So put it down for a while. Stay with the place. Let the rush to see the next thing subside. Notice what you think and feel. Most moments will pass without asking to be photographed. A few will stay with you.
Try using it differently. Sit down. Look about. Wait for the thought, or the feeling, to turn up. Then make a photograph of what brought it on.
At the Taj Mahal, it needn’t be the great marble set piece. It could be the river behind it, because sitting there made you feel calm. Later, the picture won’t just say, “This is what the river looked like.” It might bring back the stillness, the heat, the time you gave yourself to sit there.
That’s a more personal way to practise photography. The picture doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to mean something to you.
We’re not short of pretty pictures.
We’re short of pictures that mean something to us.