The Case for Slow Photography
As the always quotable landscape maestro Ansel Adams tells us, “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!”
Life, specifically digital life, seems to spend its non-sentient time attempting to overtake us by giving us access to all things digital in ever easier, faster, more addictive ways. Ultimately though, this ends up with us less engaged, less fulfilled with apparently less time and scrolling our way through the day and into the night (and as we saw in July, eventually sliding in to the blue ether of digital death). To this end, I am a fully paid-up advocate of the idea of slow photography. Now, let me be clear, although I’m subscribed to this notion, I may not necessarily adhere to its practices as often as I’d like. As a professional photographer, part of my toolkit consists of spotting opportunities at speed, capturing them and then turning them around for the client with equal alacrity.
When it comes to teaching photography, one of the things I notice is how important speed of learning and making photographs is to the student. Rather than think about the end result, the need for speed is paramount. And this is when the charge is using a DSLR. When we switch to teaching a mobile photography course the imperative for image expedition increases exponentially.
What I want to talk about is the idea of slowing our photography down, changing our attitudes towards it and ultimately changing our imagery for the better because of it. On the face of it slow photography is a relatively simple concept but, as described above, more difficult to execute. Essentially it requires us to think and to give ourselves time to think.
Almost all of us are afflicted by a ‘time poverty’ mentality. I had it myself when I sat down to write this piece. A ‘just knock-it-out’ mindset which wasn’t going to do the job, particularly for this subject! This brings me to my first observation of the application of slow photography. As you slow down and start really seeing and appreciating what is around you, you start to connect and discover a bigger ‘picture’ of your environment and the wider world around you. The seemingly banal and uninteresting of everyday life can become a source of visual stimulation. Asking questions of that banality opens you up to exploring further questions which again can inspire you to greater creativity.
As Dorothea Lange, famed for capturing ‘The Migrant Mother’, put it, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
This for me is a primary consideration when trying to slow one’s photography down. The need for the technical aspects (shutter speed, aperture etc) comes secondary to looking at and, more importantly, seeing the thing you have in front of you that you might like to make an image of. Once you have discerned what you want to achieve with your image you can then work backwards and implement the technical aspects such as depth-of-field. If you start to make a habit of this practice, you will start to be able to pre-visualise (i.e. understand how the camera will see the scene before the image is captured) without the need to raise your camera first.
Keep your camera slung or your phone in your pocket until you have thought through what it is you are looking at. Being in the moment with your photography gives you the ability to make more informed decisions on the way you would like your images to look. Let your environment dictate the way your final image should look rather than the filter you apply later. Rather than immediately drawing your weapon of choice, keep it holstered until you have a firm thought process of how you want to approach the shot. What is it that has stopped you and drawn your eye, specifically? How does the light look from different angles? What sort of composition will work best? How is the environment you are in contributing to or affecting what you see and how the image might work? What are you wanting to say about the subject and its environment? Are there distractions in the composition that you wouldn’t have noticed if you’d taken a quick ‘snap’? Did the final image describe the way the scene made you feel at the time? Did it resonate with friends and family and maybe the wider population? Using these sorts of questions will help to define your vision and create clarity in your thinking before hitting the trigger. I can bet that if you look back on your camera roll it won’t be long until you find a selection of images that make no sense to you and you’ll struggle to remember what it was you were trying to do. Taking time rather than photos will leave you with images of more significance which in turn will impart more visual and cerebral joy.
Slow photography will mean your images, whether made by a $10,000 Hasselblad or a $10 disposable camera will become better, both technically and emotionally. It will start to allow you some photographic headspace and may not just affect your photography for the better but other aspects of your digital and non-digital life may get a look in too!
