Why take photographs? What’s the point?
When I was growing up, we had a few photographs in our house. A couple small, framed pictures on a shelf. A few boxes of old four-by-six prints. Some albums. We looked through them from time to time. The same old pictures, seen again and again, familiar but still captivating. When we went on a family vacatoin, we’d get the film developed. A few rolls of film, processed by Ritz Camera, yielded around a hundred pictures. Many of them were redundant — multiple shots of the same person or scene. If we’d been more organized, we might have framed a few, or put them in an album. But the pictures usually just sat in a drawer or a shoebox, still in their envelopes. Every so often we’d look through them, shuffling them into a new order, careful not to get our fingerprints on their gloss.
The way I take and experience my own photography today, in 2025, is totally different. I make pictures everyday, of my everyday life — my family, things I see, places I go, interesting light. I look at the pictures all the time, usually on screens, which are everywhere. I’m always adding more to my online albums. So what I have, instead of photos in boxes or drawers or books, is a river of imagery running parallel to my life, memorializing it in real time, letting me see it as it unfolds. And I can walk back up the watercourse any time I want, to dip into the river as it was a year, or five years, or ten years, or decades ago.
I have a huge amount of imagery. So much that I suspect I’ll need the help of A.I. to sort it and make sense of it in the years to come. I keep only the best pictures. Still, I have so many that, in the future, I’ll be unlikely to review them all. Only a computer will be able to see them all and “know” what I photographed. I’ll be a tourist in the photographic city I’ve built.
So, what’s the point, in the long term? The truth is, I don’t know. In the present, I love looking at my pictures. Even pictures I took yesterday. Many, many years from now, how will my photographs fit into my life? I have no idea. I’m just guessing that they’ll be valuable then. I’m photographing for the long haul.
All-Seeing Eye 