Taking Pictures

Taking pictures of family, friends, ourselves, events, places, travels, animals, anything and everything.

Taking pictures to document, remember, share, prove, have, and hold.

Taking pictures for ourselves, family, friends, strangers, followers, archives, albums, the internet.

The popularity of documenting life events, sights we see, our family, things we want to remember has been increasing with the advancement of technology. The ability for most people to own a camera, whether it be a dedicated device or a cell phone, is now commonplace. Going about the world, walking through crowds of people with cameras, there is almost no one not keeping track, not clicking buttons and snapping pictures. I started documenting people documenting their own lives, photographing them photographing and noticing what—exactly—they took notice of with their pictures, after I realized that it was not always easy or clear to see what they were seeing as they stood in front of me, blocking my view with their view of the world, my camera with theirs. Eventually I became more interested in what it was they were seeing than what I could see behind them, what was in front of them became what was in front of me, and I began to consider why we take pictures in the first place, and what is done with them after they are taken. I am particularly interested in the desire to take pictures to have as keepsakes of our personal self constructed histories. The link between this type of documentation and memory is nothing short of complex. The act of photographing and recording where we have been and with whom helps “create” memories. Static reference points of posed moments and frozen waterfalls which we string together to build up a personal history for ourselves and our “memories” and remember and recreate not the mere object photographed, but ourselves in that moment. The person who thought this moment and place important enough to capture and archive. The question of the role of the photograph is then a question about whether it is a memory trigger or if, instead, it is a proxy memory itself.

Photographing the act of photographing, capturing the person in the moment of capturing a moment bypasses the subjectivity of the subjective by focusing on the subject herself, and interrogating the documented reliability of unreliable memories.