Hey all, sorry about the repetition—for some reason I seem to have had a harder time than usual responding to ohio-birds mails. Maybe it’s because I’m out of state :-) Anyway, along with my apologies if this also got repeated, here’s what I wanted to say to reply to Bill’s post:
Bill,
For me the more interesting question here is not about the birds, but about photography. As someone whose work is photography about social and environmental conditions and issues, I’m interested in the medium not just for self-expression, but for communication. And that has required me to think about a number of theoretical, critical and ethical issues—I’ve published and lectured about these issues, and for one happy period had the opportunity to teach about them at the university level.
Despite what Susan Sontag expressed many years ago, lots of people use photographs as aids to memory and to help communicate to others about their experiences. When someone says they like a picture on Facebook, they don’t mean that they necessarily like the picture—they like the content—they like to see pictures of their friends, activities of interest, and so on.
Photography has changed the way we remember and communicate. There’s the old joke about two people who meet, one with a grandchild in a stroller: “What a beautiful grandchild you have!” “Ah, this is nothing, you should see the pictures!”
But on a more serious note, we now (and I’d argue that this goes back to the beginnings of photography)use photographs to show we were there—this may not be cons ious, but I’m convinced it’s part of what goes on. Why does anyone take a picture of the Eiffel Tower, when you can buy a postcard with a picture that’s probably better? Because taking the picture yourself shows that you were there. In a more positive interpretation, it’s a piece of what you use to share the experience with the people you show the picture to. It’s part of the process of reliving and sharing—in this sense, photographs have not only an obvious iconic function, but almost one of being a relic of the experience (In this sense, I’ve had the very emotional experience in Nicaragua of people showing me “the only picture I have of her,” a daughter killed by the Somoza dictatorship, that had been handled so much the emulsion was worn—you couldn’t see anything. But it was still “a picture of her.)
So the photo becomes an element in a social interaction—when someone shows me their admittedly not-very-engaging picture of the snowy owl they saw, I don’t care much about the picture as picture—it’s part of their telling me about how great it was to see the bird. And that seems real to me.
We have some terrific bird photographers in Ohio, people whose images are both esthetically engaging and helpful in understanding and appreciating our environment. I admire their work a lot, though my bird photography is very different. But those are not the only functions that photography serves.
Sorry if this sounded like pontificating, but I find these issues interesting, and little opportunity where I live to discuss the, But, as they used to say on Law and Order, you opened the door.
Best wishes,
Steve
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Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php.
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