New Neighbors

I had a conversation with a friend a while back about photography and at one point, relating to photo editing, I asked him, Why do you care what someone else does so much? There was a long, almost uncomfortably long pause. The answer that he gave didn’t really matter much to me, but that pause really got me thinking about the idea of why do we care about things the way we do.

So this week’s podcast dives into the notion of caring about your work and how it impacts you and the viewers of your work.

When I was younger, I worked for a high-tech startup that had to lay most of the company off in order to survive. They didn’t do anything but prolong their demise, but the language used during the layoffs has stuck with me. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time but recently heard someone say it when talking about photographs. The phrase used when I was laid off and in the review was This isn’t personal. It’s just business. The thing that stuck with me all these years is that it is business to the sender of the message, but nothing but personal to the receiver.  This week’s podcast examine the impact of that phrase when talking photography.

Sometimes when we look at a photograph, we just don’t get it. We move on and don’t give it another thought. However, assuming the photographer was attempting to make something meaningful with there work, the photograph does have something to say. I have grown to think that it is our job to try and understand our reactions to photographs so that we can better understand the photographer. While we may not fully appreciate the images, if we can walk a mile in their shoes we might gain some deeper understanding into who they are and how they move through the world. In turn, maybe someone will offer us the same kindness. In this week’s podcast, I talk about how spending the time to think about the experiences of someone that led to the making the image can tell us a lot about who we are and how we see the world even in someone else’s image.