Are you collecting or creating?
Mark Lawrence
Collecting or creating
As photographers, we face many choices in pursuit of our art, some will be quite obvious — location, lens, shutter speed — others may be more subtle and perhaps are even hidden away in our subconsciousness. Perhaps at the very heart of the matter is why we have chosen to take photographs at all – are we collecting or creating?
How habits are formed
My own journey into photography began more years ago than I care to remember. With the benefit of hindsight, it started as a straightforward act of recording images of the trains I loved as a child. Armed with my first SLR camera and some black and white film, I would spend time at my local station photographing whatever passed through. The results were, at best, variable, but the satisfaction of capturing a “rare bird” on film was immense. I could share it with like-minded friends, adding another prized image to my growing collection. The quality of the image was almost irrelevant as the beast had been snared.
When images become about something
Fast forward more than forty years, and I am still photographing railways. My archive now contains over 25,000 images. Looking back, however, I have come to realise that the photographs I value most are not the simple records taken at stations or by the lineside. They are the images that evoke a memory of a particular time and place, that suggest something of the atmosphere and experience of being there. They are photographs that are about the railway, rather than simply of it. Interestingly, these are also the images that tend to resonate most with friends who have no particular interest in railways at all.
In my landscape photography — pursued later, and a little older and hopefully wiser — I often find myself asking the same question. Am I simply collecting pleasing images of beautiful places, or am I trying to create something more personal? I would like to think it is the latter. For me, creating photographs is about making images that reflect my own response to a place and a moment that matters to me. If others connect with them, that is a welcome bonus.
Familiar views, familiar responses
I am writing this while in the Italian Dolomites, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of extraordinary natural beauty. It would be easy to stand in the same well-worn spots as countless others and make a perfectly respectable postcard image. You only need to look at the ground beneath your feet to see how often certain viewpoints are revisited. People come here for many reasons, and photography takes many forms, but for me the challenge is to move beyond simply recording what is in front of me and instead to engage more fully with the experience of being here.
Choice, intention, and attention
Once we have mastered our equipment — something most of us achieve sooner than we think ‑we are free to concentrate on how we want to respond to a scene. Creating an image involves intention and choice. We decide what to include and what to leave out, whether to suggest stillness or movement, whether to draw attention to detail or allow the whole scene to speak. These decisions are less critical when we are simply collecting images, but they become central when we want our photographs to communicate something of how a place felt, not just how it looked.
Creating with restraint
At times I think of collecting as being a little like the behaviour of the squirrel in our garden, endlessly gathering and storing food without ever quite knowing when enough is enough. Some of it is forgotten, some of it never used. Creation, by contrast, is more selective. It asks us to slow down, to make fewer images, and to invest more care in each one. Personally, I would rather create a small number of well-considered photographs of something fairly ordinary than accumulate a large number of average images of somewhere extraordinary.
A useful distinction, not a rule
Of course, distinctions like this are never absolute. Photography rarely fits neatly into defined categories. A single image seldom tells a complete story, particularly in landscape photography, and it is often through a small group of images that a fuller sense of a place emerges. So perhaps it is no surprise that, as I look back on my time in the Dolomites, I find myself selecting a handful of photographs that together describe my experience of the week.
In doing so, I realise that I have been creating a collection after all.