Why Do You Want to Take Photographs?

At first, this may seem like a question with an obvious answer, rather like asking someone why they want to drink coffee. But this is one of those questions that seems to get harder the more it is grappled with. Let’s return to the coffee example for a second. There are several possible, easily defined reasons why someone may want to drink coffee. These reasons include taste, stimulative effect, and possibly social contact. Now try answering, with some level of clarity, the question of why you want to take photographs, and then write down your answers. The good news is that any effort you put into answering this question at any time during your photographic career will pay for itself many times over.

This is my most recent attempt to answer the question: I am obsessed with aesthetics and composition. The camera and digital editing tools provide a means to capture and manipulate lines, tones, colors, and shapes very quickly and relatively easily. Photography allows me to cover much more ground than any other visual medium. I am interested in showing the connection between the photograph and human emotion. More specifically, I want to experiment with how much information can be removed from an image before it loses emotional impact. Allied to this, I want to study why contrast seems to be the most important quality when it comes to eliciting an emotional response. I enjoy exploring the relationship between the logical and the emotional, and the camera is the best tool for this process.

The less generic and more personal the response, the more useful it is likely to be. I have no desire to go all Zen at this point, but the answers should come from within and should be your answers. While you work on answering this question, forget my opinions and the opinions of writers and photographers that you admire. For the moment, it really is all about you.

One other bit of advice is to make your answers as open, as opposed to closed, as possible. Think in terms of exploration, not being the best or getting to some imaginary winning post.

If I had taken the time to ask this question of myself when I first started out, the answer would have been along these lines: I want to find the most beautiful scenes, people, and objects and produce the best possible two-dimensional representations of them.

This answer is a lot less open ended than my current working one, and consequently it would be a lot less useful. It is also much more generic, and while it would be better than nothing, it is nowhere near as useful as my current answer.

Of course there are many possible answers; the important thing is to be honest. The worst trap to fall into is writing something down because you think it is more worthy than what you really want to use the camera for.

Here are just a few possible reasons for wanting to pick up a camera:

Record family life

Record another interest, such as a sport

Sell stuff on an auction website

Build a record of beautiful things

Understand visual language

Explore artistic concepts

Expand personal horizons

Supply images for a website or social media page

Spend time with your photographer friends

Ideally, the question of why you want to take photographs should be a fundamental part of your ongoing internal dialog about photography. Every image you make changes you, usually by a tiny amount, but occasionally by a massive amount. These changes accumulate and will cause you to periodically revise how you think about your own photography.

However dedicated you are to photography—or even if you’re obsessed with it—there will be times when pointing a camera at stuff no longer excites you and editing your images becomes more of a chore than an exercise in discovery. We all have days like this, but if these days start to stretch into weeks or months, then it is a fair bet that you need to take another look at your reason for taking pictures. If it’s just for a day or two, though, do something other than photography if at all possible. We all get jaded from time to time.

The question of why you want to take photographs should be a fundamental part of your ongoing internal dialog about photography.

If this whole approach seems a bit daunting, another exercise to try is to look at images on the Internet, or in books, museums, and galleries; find photographs that appeal to you and then find out a little about the photographer and his or her motivations. In addition, you can look for common features in photographs that appeal to you. A quick indication of your artistic preferences can be gleaned by determining whether it is the subject matter that appeals to you or the use of color, strong lines, or other compositional elements. This exercise will aid you toward expressing why you want to take photographs. It may take a little time, but that is perfectly okay; this is not a race.

I suspect that most people who buy a camera and then leave it at the back of a drawer or let it gather dust after taking a few dozen photographs do so because they don’t take time to address this fundamental question.