Making Sense of this Style of Photography
When I’m asking myself all the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions about these montages, the easiest is ‘how did it start?’ – and the answer is ‘pragmatically!’
I was doing a course on wellbeing photography with Ruth Davey (in October 2020) which encouraged me to take the camera as my companion on ‘noticing walks’ – using it to help me engage more deeply with my environment by looking out for colours and textures, anything surprising or unexpected. And afterwards, I simply created montages of my ‘findings’ – it seemed the obvious, pragmatic way to present different groups of images that were linked by physical proximity or by a theme but, at the same time, were often disparate in their eccentricity or apparent randomness.
‘A Sense of Now’
Placing myself at the centre of several noticing walks
These montages – or story-images, as I prefer to call them – are a visible sign that my approach towards photography was changing but the deeper understanding that Ruth’s ideas and ethos had affected a more profound philosophical change came much more slowly, and were only fully realised when I read Wendy Smith describing:
A shift in perspective toward valuing innate qualities
(as opposed to physical or comparative ones).
It was one of those phrases that jumped off the page – resonating and having relevance to everything I did or touched. At first, I recognised that I was viewing the world around me in a different way and I thought that, perhaps, that was the foremost ‘shift in perspective’. But later, I became aware, and then fully acknowledged, that it also related to the manner in which I’d created a different role for the camera. It had become a companion – a partner in crime, my ‘expert eyes’ – moreover it seemed to talk in Ruth’s voice, constantly asking “have you noticed …”, “do you value …”
Importantly, the camera was no longer a somewhat sinister collaborator in an obsessive approach to creating ‘wall-worthy’ art. Instead it’s become a friendly, supportive, encouraging companion helping me embrace the “innate qualities” that Wendy Smith refers to – my ‘smile-worthy’ ones. That was my ‘shift in perspective’ – ‘wall-worthy’ to ‘smile-worthy’. And having made it, I’m sure you can easily understand why I became committed to this style of photography – I’d fallen in love with its freshness, spontaneity, and joyousness, as well as its creative challenges.
Notes:
You can read more about my experience of Ruth's course HERE …
Or visit her website, Look Again, HERE …
Grieving an Acquired Disability’ by Wendy Smith, MA, LMHCA is online HERE …
The term ‘expert eyes’ is taken from ‘On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes’ by Alexandra Horowitz)