Photography starts now

Cellphones have made photography into what it always set out to be: a universal and democratic language. Everyone who has a mobile phone can participate in a conversation with images, regardless of the verbal language that they speak. Photography works at its best when it can ‘capture’ that which has no words. It is when photography says what words cannot even begin to express that it becomes a different form of communication.

This has implications that we cannot even know at this time. Imagine how this could change our idea of illiteracy, as people who are ‘not literate’ could communicate with images! Imagine if we could one day have a Hamlyn dictionary of images? A language where the words are images.

In this sense, one could say ‘photography starts now’.

Professional photography as we knew it, as a career choice, is certainly in a difficult place. In most situations people can take their own photographs, so the need for the paid photographer is no longer there. We see this most of all in photo-journalism, as photography has now become a public act and a ‘people’s’ language. Anyone who is ‘there’ and has a mobile phone can make a photographic record, so it is no longer only the prerogative of the professional photographer. We have recently seen great photography published which was made with the phone camera. Documentary photography, or the archiving of our time, will remain as important as ever. It is just the possibility to make a living from this that will change, unless it is reinvented.

So, while photography becomes a people’s movement and the language most people speak, what will a professional photographer become? But, of course, as with writing, not everyone who writes is a writer. I think photography will become the raw material, and the ‘photographer’ will make new forms from this ‘clay’.

The difference with mobile phone photography is that people photograph with different intentions: people are not necessarily looking for ‘good’ photographs but for what is most important to them. So the range of what is considered ‘photo worthy’ gets expanded and, through this, new forms will emerge. This is what photography needs — new forms that push the limits of the medium.

I still work mainly with film. I like how it slows me down, how considered each frame is. But, I use my mobile phone for instagram and WhatsApp. I particularly enjoy WhatsApp as it has certainly replaced letter-writing for me. When I think of someone, I send them an image that I hope also transmits how I am feeling at the time (something that conveys more than just where I am and what I am doing). This is just one of the ways that I think photographs will start replacing words in general communication. The WhatsApp photo is like a postcard, but I also send very still videos so I can send sound as well as moving images, and sometimes only audio. So the cellphone gives me three different ways to communicate.

This then leads me to the idea of the ‘moving still image’. In the digital world, when the difference between still and movie is just a button, perhaps the form of the future will be a still moving image, or a still image with sound. (All this is so easily done on the phone: think of when, by mistake, you think you have made a still image but have actually recorded a movie.) This in itself changes the idea of the photographer. How then can a photography school not teach film? It is in this very overlap, of still and movie, that the new definition of a photographer could emerge.

What we do miss in this world flooded with images are editors. Whether that can happen as an app or still requires a person remains to be seen, but someone has to make sense of all the billions of images that we throw out each day. Still, I am surprised we do not have an app that can work as an editor. Perhaps editing is something photographers will have to learn to do for themselves. How to make a poem out of their collection of ‘words’.

While following my tips with LBC (see box below) might help you make photographs on the phone, it does not make you the author of the work. That ‘something else’, that indefinable quality, that which makes the image linger and give it resonance, is very hard to articulate. It comes, perhaps, from a honing of intuition. Which, in turn, comes from all the experience you bring, whether it is the experience you gather through literature, travel, cinema, or just through living life. In that technology cannot help, and in that there are no short-cuts.

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