We had a running joke in our house when I was growing up; whenever we would go on holiday, my Mum would take photos of pretty buildings and parks and then when she got home and looked through them, she couldn’t remember what on earth all of the photos were of.
“What’s that?”
“Erm, I think that was the town hall. No, wait – that one’s the town hall. This one is the…parliament building?!”
In the last couple of years, I had realised that this had become me also.
When I first set off on this trip last year, I realised very early on that I was photographing things that I really had no interest in, only to be totally uninspired when I looked back at them.
In light of this, I made a pact with myself.
I would not take photos of anything unless it moved me to look at, would remind of a funny/special/historic moment, or if it was of a building I had actually been inside and looked around. The only exception to this rule is if the building is so ridiculously pretty that I just can’t help but take a photo of it.
I mainly initiated this pact because I realised that all too often I was just taking photos because I felt I should. I thought it was the kind of thing you ‘did’.
Pretty church? Snap. Interesting-looking museum? Snap.
Then it dawned on me that I wasn’t creating memories by taking these photos, I was just going through the motions.
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I was using up valuable space on my memory card with photos of things that I didn’t even care about. I knew that if I looked back at them in years to come, they would simply become the “town hall” or the “parliament building”, while I clicked through looking for photos of people, great food or fun times.
So now, every time I find myself reaching for my camera as we walk past a building, I ask myself: “Do I really want to look at a picture of this in twenty years’ time?”
This is particularly true for museums or sculptures that I have never ventured inside or bothered to discover what they are of or why they are there. I feel like I’m betraying the architect or the original designer by taking a picture that means nothing to me and just dismisses all of the work they have put into it. (Remember when I took no photos in Zagreb of things I had no interest in? That was the turning point.)
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Sure, you will still see photos on this blog of pretty buildings and scenery – mainly because I want to be able to reminisce about the overall “presence” of a place when I look back at these places and also to give you a good sense of what a certain place is like. But I only ever include photos now that stirred me to take them, for some reason or other. Whether that is because of the architecture of the building, or the way I felt at the time I took the photo.
I recently read an article questioning whether people really soak in what they are experiencing, or whether they are so consumed by photographing what is going on that they don’t actually enjoy the moment. Like those people who go on a tour and video the whole thing. I always ask myself “Why?” Do they really want to sit at home later and watch the whole tour back?
I have been guilty of being so intent on getting good photographs of something that I have missed the actual event while fiddling with camera settings. It’s pretty sad, when you think about it.
There are times when you need to just sit back and enjoy something, rather than experience it secondhand through static photographs at a later date.
Just saying.
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