Forage, farm, hunt

A photographer asks: why bother making photographs?

I

I bought a photograph and hung it on my wall. The picture shows a woman holding the reins of a horse. I had found it in an archive in Paris, tucked inside a cardboard folder marked « l’Ouest Americain C19 ». The subject looks right at the camera, blinking. Her eyes could be closed on purpose, but the half-smile on her face convinced me that it was an accident.

Despite the mistake, this is the picture that was developed and printed. The woman has Native American features and a boxy shirt, a black headband, ankle boots adorned with beads and long, dark, straight hair from which a feather pokes. It’s unclear why the picture was taken, or how it relates to life at that time in her part of the world. The image is what you could consider « vernacular » ¹ Since I found it in a box marked as containing pictures from the nineteenth-century American West, I took all of these characteristics at face value. I believed I was looking at an example of Native American life in the late 1800s, after a century of forced migration, subjugation and marginalisation. At the time when I bought it, I felt that photographs were assembled from components of an indisputable, incomparable real world, but now (as a photographer myself), I suspect every part of it — the light, the setting, the clothes, the expression.

I thought that from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the world would photograph itself forever. That it would image itself into greater self-awareness through an endless and increasingly broad flood of wet plates, snapshots, selfies and surveillance footage. Through this, I thought, we would reveal ourselves to our future, to our descendants, the increasing ease and accessibility of photography encouraging a sloppiness that would betray our true selves. In the corpus of effortless photography, our descendants could discover that some of us love artful lunches, or that others visit the Mona Lisa to take her picture. And we all take pictures of light itself: the sun coming up and going down, neon signs reflected in windows, light filtered through overlapping leaves.²