Finding Inspiration

The standard advice is to photograph what you are interested in, but what if what you are interested in is the process of taking photographs? It's all very well if you are a hiker and Sierra Club member, but what about the guy or gal who just likes mucking about with cameras? The general advice is that unless you get really emotional about a subject, then you aren't going to produce great art.

Even my own articles on Luminous Landscape (first one published, next two to come) suggest that you have to be excited about the subject matter, that if you have no emotional response to the subject, how can anyone else have an emotional response to your photograph.

Can, for example, someone who thinks football is boring, somehow still take a great football picture? Can a photographer who is assigned to photograph a boxing match and who is disgusted by the whole thing still manage to make a photograph which shows the excitement of the sport?

Was Edward Weston obsessed with dead pelicans? I doubt it. What Edward Weston was excited about was shapes, curves, tones. He didn't care a whit where he found shapes that excited him - whether a pepper in a funnel or a toilet, it didn't matter as long as it had the 'light'.

I think that if you get excited about finding something interesting to photograph, you don't need to be involved with the thing itself, only with it's possibilities as subject matter.

If we take the same argument to the world of painting, was Rembrand't obsessed with rich burghers of Ghent, or was he obsessed with light and composition and conveying expressions?

Was Andy Worhol obsessed with Campbell's Tomato soup - probably not.

I like photographing weathered industrial subjects. I'm not an engineer, I don't tinker with old cars, my back garden isn't littered with odd bits of machinery. I like old machinery because it photographs well, not because of some obsession about the past. I'm happy to photograph modern structures if they have the right tones and textures - eg. my parking garage series. I do park but I'm not obsessed with parking structures.