From the Prez's Pad: What do we photograph? by Nancy Lehrer

How do we choose what to photograph? This was the question asked by Bill Hendrix at our yearend banquet. We saw in Ines Robert’s photographs of Iceland the beauty of color, light, and life. Bill described her photography as “Zen Poems”. In contrast, Bill’s photography on Ritual presented a sociological lens into people performing rituals almost too difficult to look at. He even described his goals as getting uncomfortably close.

Historically, photography began as a method to accurately reproduce the visual world. In 1839 Daguerre announced his photographic process and this immediately changed our visual language. With the steamships and trains of the industrial revolution, travel became increasingly accessible and as people began to seeing the distant lands, first-hand, their desire to view, share, and revisit – with photographic consistency – grew. Confidence in the ability for paintings to accurately represent the visual world eroded. Photography, and the photographic process, exploded.

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer invented wet plate photography which was cheaper than the daguerreotypes and permitted unlimited reproductions through the use of the negative/positive process. In Paris 1854, the first portrait photography studio was opened by Adolphe Disderi which lead to a worldwide boom in portrait studios over the following decade. By 1855 photography was popular in the US, and in 1861 Mathew Brady and his staff began their exhaustive coverage of the Civil War exposing over 7000 negatives.

Color photography was demonstrated as early as 1861 and the next major advance, dry plate photography, was manufactured commercially in 1878. In 1880 George Eastman, at the entrepreneurial age of 24, set up the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. The first Kodak cameras appeared in 1888, and in 1900 the Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera was introduced. Kodachrome was developed in 1936, at about the same time as the 35mm single-lens reflex camera, and was discontinued in 2009 with the last image processed in a lab in Kansas in late 2010. 1948 saw the introduction of Polaroid instant black-and-white film but Polaroid was to go bankrupt in 2001.

In 1981, the Sony Mavica electronic still camera was introduced as the first commercial electronic camera. Kodak introduced the first megapixel sensor in 1986 and in 2005 Canon introduced the first full-frame digital camera – the beloved Canon EOS 5D. Phillipe Kahn built the first camera phone in 1997 by jerry-rigging a cell phone with a digital camera and made cell-phone and photosharing history by publicly sharing a portrait of his daughter, Sophie, from the maternity ward.

With all this photographic technology at our finger-tips, what should we do with it now? Where do we choose to point our cameras? Initially, photography was documentary. What to photograph was based on what had not yet been photographed. Modern dictionaries list the following definition of photographic “Resembling a photograph, especially representing or simulating something with great accuracy and fidelity of detail.” We use the term photographic memory to mean “Capable of retaining accurate or vivid impressions: a photographic memory.” Society has coined the phrase “Seeing is believing”. Do we still choose to photograph with great accuracy and fidelity of detail?

What we choose to photograph likely changes by situation, mood, and time. Sometimes we photograph personal events – the birth of a newborn, a child’s basketball game, the marriage of your youngest daughter. Sometimes we photograph places – historic towns ravaged by time, newly minted skyscrapers, lush and colorful spring landscapes. Sometimes we photograph objects – the smallest details of a flower, the peeling paint of a weather-worn door, the view out the window. Our subjects often vary widely. They can be beautiful or ugly, miniature or vast, colorful or drab, animate or inanimate, unemotional or intense. But whatever we choose to photograph, we should photograph with intent, integrity, and imagination.