Loosely translated “Foto Betiko” means “forever photo” in Basque, and it was a name that I chose for this site and my foundation many years before I actually retired from my tech career and pivoted toward my passions.
Back then, I very confidently referred to myself as a documentary photographer. Someone who tried to capture compelling scenes and subjects that deserved not to be forgotten. I think that this notion of preservation is something I’ve been doing, in one form or another, all my life. For example, my other passion is genealogy, and I’ve been researching my family history for over 30 years, starting way earlier than most genealogists.
But we live in an heavily over-photographed world. Almost every subject worth pointing a camera at, every scene worth capturing, has been captured…from every angle, in every way, in every season, by dozens of photographers. So it seems to me that the only frontier left for a photographer is to explore the “why” of a photograph: Why did I care? How did this scene make me feel? What did I see in this shot? What did this mean to me when I took the shot? And perhaps more provocatively…what does this shot mean to me now? It’s this last question that subtly changes the notion of a ‘forever photo’. I’ll return to that in a minute.
Meanwhile, consider this photo:
It’s my shot of the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. If there was ever an over-photographed subject here in Southeast Wisconsin it’s the MAM and specifically Santiago Calatrava’s ‘wings’. And there is no question that there are many better—more stunning, more creative, better composed—photographs than mine. I mean I shot this scene straight on, a compositional ‘no-no’, and in post I deliberately cropped the photo to remove the context, isolating just the spire and the wings. So you could ask: “Why?” And my answer is: Because I’ll never take the definitive photo of the Quadracci Pavilion, but I can tell you what I saw—a Valkyrie’s spear on the left and the uplifted head of a horse (Pegasus) on the right.
That title covers the ‘why’ I chose to shoot the scene and what I saw. But if I choose a more interpretive shot today, what might I see in this shot tomorrow? What might another viewer see in my shot or another photographer see in this scene? In that sense, a ‘forever photo’ is not the static capture that you publish so that the scene is not forgotten (Calatrava’s masterpiece isn’t likely to be forgotten). Instead it’s the capture that can be given a new interpretation…many new interpretations. And Foto Betiko no longer just about preservation, but rather about conversations I’m having with the photographer I was, the photographer I’ll become, and photographers I haven’t yet, and may never, meet. The photo is forever because it’s never truly finished.
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