Elsewhere on this site, I mention a photo that I characterized as, “…perhaps the finest introspective shot I’ve ever taken.” It’s part of my Metro Studies project where I was shooting out-of-focus images in Washington, DC’s Metro system. You can see the photo on the right.
So what’s so important about this shot? Two things… First, how I chose this photo over other shots of me at that moment, speaks directly to something that’s been influencing my photography more and more in the last couple of years: Finding a photo’s meaning. Second, this photo is as clear an example as I have of the importance of titles in my photography, an approach that’s summed up in the following quote:
The photograph reveals the world.
The title reveals the photographer.
So how did this shot come about? What was I trying to capture, and what is this photo’s meaning? The short answer is…at the moment I took the shot, I didn’t know. I thought I was just trying to capture a selfie with an interesting perspective. The intent and the meaning came later.
You can see how blurry this shot is–not from my messing with the focus, but rather from camera shake. (I was on a moving metro train.) And I’m masked because this was shot during the pandemic. But what you can’t see and perhaps don’t know is that I am seriously hearing-impaired, and the pandemic was a tough time for me because I depend on reading lips to augment my comprehension.
I didn’t immediately publish this shot. If fact, I processed a couple of similar ‘in focus’ selfies, but for some reason I kept returning to this one. My subconscious knew something that my conscious mind didn’t recognize for many months. This photo is a visual depiction of what it feels like when you can’t comprehend what is being communicated to you. When I realized that, the title seemed obvious: How the ‘World Behind Masks’ Sounds to Me.
So returning to the first point, I’d found the photo’s meaning and named it. And in doing so after so many months, I began to understand that meaning doesn’t always show up when you press the shutter. In fact, you may be taking a photo for reasons that aren’t yet clear. You sometimes need patience in order to find the meaning. Regarding the second point, I didn’t set out to make an introspective photograph, but my subconscious knew something I didn’t…that there was a way to reveal, visually, my pandemic struggle. In other words, the photographer was revealed. In this case through the circumstances of the capture and through the title.
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