Why do we take a photograph? Has the mobile killed the camera?

Following on from the previous article, ‘What is a photograph?’

Read ‘we’ as ‘I’ for technical purposes.

65 years ago, I would possibly have given a different answer to most of the rest of my life.

I took photographs of my parents, holidays, school trips and occasional landscapes on a Kodak Brownie, fascinated by the whole process… load this strange roll of 120 film into a black box, then point it at the subject, wait two weeks to receive Agfa transparencies or Ilford black and white film and prints from the pharmacy.

I would hold the prints in my hand, and transparencies I would hold up to light, fascinated, no projector, so just a child holding square colour transparencies up to the window light. It was like a door to another dimension.

I was hooked, and photography took control of my imagination and life.

The childish excitement and fascination have never left me, although for many years the answer as to ‘why’ became money as the ‘focus’ shifted to commercial work.

So, back to ‘why’
I ‘developed’ a love of the process of freezing time and capturing or creating images which were my vision or memory of time.

The box Brownie reincarnated into every make and shape of camera available as the money flowed in.

I became obsessed, my blood flowed with Ag, which 25 years ago started to evolve into 0s and 1s.

At art college, my best friend (Bill) had an Halina Paulette, which seemed like the pinnacle of technology until I started the photography classes and looked through an SLR (Pentax) for the first time. My brain exploded. I could see the real world in 3D, and I could see the effects of aperture change in real time.

I soon discovered 120 and large format. This was like taking the little boy to the greatest toy shop in the world.

Stories I have many, and a lot of them are funny, but the first semi-commercial story was 6 months after leaving art college and starting a design studio with my friend Bill. We were asked to cover a beauty competition at our old college.

We had no equipment, so I walked into a local camera store and persuaded them to loan a Pentax for the day (free).

So off Bill and myself went with two rolls of film, feeling like two pros.

The contest was won by a male student dressed as a girl, and we snapped the first film, looked at the film counter, rewound the film, opened the camera back to discover that in our excitement, we had forgotten to load the film.

Back to why?
All aspects of Commercial Photography and Graphic Design drove my photography for many years, but for the last 22/23 years, I have recorded life and people in my village, inspired by the late James Ravilious (The Bee Archive). Also, I made many images just for the sheer joy of ‘recording’.

In 2024, I designed an exhibition through which to present the images of my village from 23 years to my neighbours.

The exhibition was successful and was my gift to the village for all the kindness shown to me, a silly old Englishman who always had a camera in his hand.

The exhibition was a full stop in my life, and in the year since the exhibition, I have only picked a real camera up a few times. The exhibition took 1 year of continuous work to complete, and after I was exhausted.

I constantly take photos, but mainly on my mobile, and have gone back in time to taking snaps of family life, friends, their animals, plus my cat with the occasional landscape or found image thrown in, plus of course the ubiquitous selfie.

I do have to say, whilst I love my Fuji cameras and lenses, the quality of images from my mobiles is superb, and I printed some to 2 mtrs for the exhibition in 2024.

So why do we, or I, take photos?
65 years ago, most of us took photos as a record of our lives and put prints into albums. Now, photos are posted on the internet to display how we live or to influence and only exist in the ether with a few prints made.

This is, of course, a generalisation because there are many great photographers out in the wild making great images, many can be seen on Fuji X Passion.

On my photographic journey, having tried virtually every camera but I settled on Fuji. Why? ‘They just feel right and deliver the goods.’

I do confess to not using social media in any form, and also being in a creative hiatus, where I am constantly asking why?

I have time, I have the equipment, I have the subjects, but I am searching for inspiration or the lightning bolt sometimes. I feel like it is a book I have written, and I have finished writing the last chapter.

I have even considered going back in time to drawing, painting and printmaking.

I am concentrating on rebuilding the archive website, which I have built and operate for my village, and I also love producing books, which is in these times incredibly easy.

I have several ideas for the future, but not ‘the one’ I  just hope I have enough life left to choose and carry out ‘the one ‘ when it appears.

So multi-faceted answers to why, but one thing is sure, I will never stop until I fall off my perch.

All images – iPhones