02

The Audience’s Good

BECAUSE I TOLD YOU I WANTED TO ABANDON asking the “Is it good?” question, consider this your invitation to ask a different question: How will others experience this photograph? Since so many of us make photographs as a means of expression and in hopes that, through our images, others will see the world in new ways, it’s a fair question. It also begs another: Does it even matter how others will experience this photograph? But we’ll get to that in the next chapter.

First, let’s acknowledge that when our images find an audience beyond ourselves, there is an alchemy that occurs; the photograph, previously just a two-dimensional image, becomes an experience when viewed, or read, by other people.

Those other people are among billions of people on this planet. More than likely (and certainly if the photograph finds its way to the internet), many of those people will be unknown to you. They will come from different cultures and, if your work has any longevity, from different times. They will bring with them a lifetime of experiences, influences, memories, tastes, and ways of understanding the world. This is true even for those close to you. Showing your photographs to your mother or your kids or a neighbour will result in experiences of those photographs that you would never be able to predict with any accuracy.

This is not a weakness of art. It is not a deficiency in your photograph. It is the alchemy that happens when your intent, expressed through your craft, becomes a photograph that is interpreted by that one singular person. You can choose to be uncomfortable with this chemistry and try your best to control it, but the results will likely be contrived and feel controlling, heavy-handed, or manipulative. Or you can embrace the mystery. It’s probably healthy for artists to get comfortable with nuance and ambiguity. Uncertainty isn’t a bad thing.

What is not healthy is to reconcile yourself to the idea that you can’t control others’ experiences of your photographs and, therefore, to conclude that your intent doesn’t matter. To throw your hands in the air and say, “Why bother?” But that won’t get you anywhere, and here’s why: Your intent may not come through in an image the way you hoped it would, but it is still important to the creation of that image, to every choice you make from the moment you pick up the camera, to your framing and choice of lens and composition and every setting available to you, not to mention your choices in the edit and in any post-production you do. Your intent, or vision, matters every step of the way until that photograph or body of work is set down in front of an audience and you invite them to experience it on their own terms.

That experience is a mix of your many choices, what the photograph itself becomes, and the many different people who will read it. If that combination is not magic, it can certainly border on the mystical. And if not that, then at the very least it is unknown, unpredictable.

So why bother asking how others will experience my photograph at all? And if I do ask this question, where do I begin if I don’t even know who those others are?

I took counselling courses in college, and one of the teacher’s lessons that stuck with me was this: While we are all different, we are also all the same. In the particular lies the universal. And while there are few certainties, there are many commonalities. This is the beginning of empathy, and I want to argue that empathy is a powerful place from which to create and refine your photographs.

You can’t know what others will think. Not for sure. But you can put yourself in their shoes and ask the question. “Will someone who isn’t here in the moment and place in which I am making this photograph get a sense of what I am trying to show them? Are there elements I need to exclude to make that clearer? Are there elements I need to include or make prominent in the frame? What elements of the visual language could I include to increase the mood and make this scene a little less ambiguous (assuming clarity or a specific mood is important to me)?”

As with much of this book, it is not having the specific answers that will help you; it’s asking the questions and looking for possibilities and that sweet spot where the subject gets its best expression—first for you, and then for your audience.

That last sentence is a loaded one. Momentarily setting aside the troubling term “best expression,” let me quickly address the idea of an audience and suggest that we stop worrying so much about it, and why that’s possible. This is a theory, so take it with a grain of salt. But here’s my idea: If you make the work that is for you, work that you love, work that gives the subject its best expression (definitions to come, so stick with me), and work that is also empathetic, then it will draw an audience that responds to that work. Your work determines the audience. On some level, your audience self-selects based on what you make. If they don’t get you or your work, they won’t be your audience. So you don’t have to consider them in what you make. You don’t have to try to guess what they’ll think or how they’ll read it. It’s about resonance. Your work either will or won’t resonate with them. And if it does, and they become part of that group of people who want to listen to you through your work, that resonance will ensure a certain level of understanding because you’re already on the same wavelength. If your audience is, on some level, like you, it will be easier to create work that resonates with them because you’re first making it for you, and—to repeat—they are like you (as much as they are also very different).

Rather than asking if others will like or respond to my work, I make my photographs for me. I am my own first audience. So then the question becomes: To what things within a photograph do we respond? Is there some kind of list of the photographic devices to which we are drawn? Authors have many literary devices that they use to accomplish certain things. Is it possible to begin exploring those photographic devices so we can be aware of them as tools, or elements, of visual language, and use them to give better expression to our subjects?

In The Soul of the Camera, the book that precedes this one, I suggested that if there is going to be soul or life in our images, then it is up to us to put it there. Really, I was suggesting that we ourselves are the soul of the camera and that we become much more aware of the role of the photographer in the making of pictures. Here I want to take that suggestion further and explore the idea that if our photographs are to give the best expression possible to their subjects and connect to others, and if they are to have a heartbeat of some kind with which we resonate, it’s up to us to understand that and use every tool we can to make it happen. If The Soul of the Camera asked, “What is it within the photographer that makes possible the creation of a stronger photograph?” then The Heart of the Photograph asks, “What is it within the photograph itself that might make it stronger, more resonant, better experienced by the reader? What can we do to give the subject its best expression?”

Part Two explores what I mean by giving the subject its best expression, and Part Three, the bulk of this book, is about the tools we have to create that expression. Part Four wraps it up and brings it all together. But we’re not there just yet, and before we head in that direction, we need to talk about you, the photographer.

You cannot know exactly how one person will read your image any more than you can know for sure how one person will take a joke or interpret a page from the Bible. If that one person (or many people) doesn’t like your photograph, it is not necessarily an indication of whether your work is worthwhile, valuable, or even art, any more than the fact that many people don’t like sushi or the paintings of Jackson Pollock disqualifies sushi as its own culinary art or the work of Pollock as worthy of consideration.

This is a conversation not about certainties but about possibilities, and to some extent, you must always embrace that mystery when you create any art at all—the possibility that you might be misunderstood, disliked, or just ignored. But remember, this whole conversation is about finding new ways to understand the possible reactions to a photograph in order to engage with those possibilities more playfully and more intentionally as you create art first for yourself and then for an audience that has chosen to experience your work because they resonate with it, and with you.