When I’m up first in my house, along with listening to the birds and whatever sounds are filtering up from Sunset Blvd (this morning it’s cheers and whoops as the LA marathon runners go by), I watch where the light is filtering in. I love when the sun is low enough in the sky that it hits the trees before it streams through my windows, making dappled, moving, moments of light and shadow on my walls.
I’ve taken out my phone or camera to capture it probably hundreds of times.
I want to step back from technique today and talk about why. Why do we take photographs?
I have always loved taking photographs. I remember getting my first camera at about five. It was a film camera and took little square photographs. There was such joy in being able to capture the world from my point of view. As much as I was photographing what was around me, I think on some level, it was a way of planting a flag and declaring that I was there. Look at what I see!
I think I know my own childhood as much through photographs as my own lived experience. Both my father and my aunt took gorgeous black and white photographs of all of us growing up. We had a dark room in our house. I loved going in there and watching my dad in the red light, making images appear seemingly by magic. Do I remember the donkey, Samantha, or just the photo of my brother as a boy walking along beside her? My identity of being a slightly feral kid, often covered in dirt from playing outside, comes as much from the photos of me looking that way as any concrete memory I can put my finger on.
I lost many of these photographs to a fire years ago. It happened while I was out of town and there was no chance to save anything. The hardest, most truly irreplaceable losses of that experience were photographs, including albums that my grandfather had made of my mom as a child and then young mother, with my siblings and I in tow.
While acting and theater became my main love and creative outlet, beginning in my teens and on into adulthood, I always continued to photograph my life around me. Usually with a point and shoot film camera that I always had on me.
I recently lost someone who was very important to me. We met at 18, at an acting program in Oxford, England. My grief at hearing he had died was intense, despite the fact that it’s been many years since we’ve truly been present in each other’s lives. I’ve poured over pictures of us together and with friends from the summer we met and the decades after. I love all of the goofy candids, but I have one photograph I took of him, a portrait, that I keep returning to again and again. It technically has plenty of flaws, his eyes are in shadow, but he just looks so truly like himself. He was painfully handsome, but more than that, I feel his humor and intelligence in it. His lips are pursed in a bit of a smirk, and he’s definitely about to say something clever and maybe slightly cutting. And I just find myself grateful to my twenty something self for making that photo and to him for letting me. It’s not always easy to let yourself be seen.
And that’s what it all comes down to for me. Photography is really a way of making the transient experience of seeing tangible. And there is maybe nothing that I want the people in my life to know more than this: I see you. I see you as you are. I’m not trying to change you. I see you.
After I had a child, the demands of an actor’s life felt pretty damn impossible. I couldn’t see how theater, with its scheduled of being gone every evening, could fit into my life. And while I did drag my son all over the city as I auditioned, mostly for commercials, and worked a fair amount in that time, it was incredibly hard. I found the creative part of myself searching for something. Picking up my husband’s old manual digital camera and photographing my new baby and life at home, became a way to start making sense of it all to myself.
What did I want to put in my frame? What do I find beautiful, funny, worthy of remembering? After years of trying to make myself fit into other people’s stories, what stories do I have to tell? Photography gave me a way of starting to answer these questions, one shutter click at a time.
Clearly there’s not just one answer to why. For me, photography has been a creative outlet, a declaration of being alive, an attempt to freeze time, a way to tell the stories around me, as I see them. It’s my best attempt to say I see you and I love you, to the people that matter to me, again and again.
How about for you? Why do you take photos? I’d really love to hear your answers in the comments.