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I believe there’s a case for life as the raw material of photography.
Painting has its paints and so you push together the pigment into something that feels right to you. Representational, if you wish, or it can be the act of the brush. It can be abstract. You can pour, splatter, sprinkle or spray but paint explains the actions. Art needs to understand its essence to understand its endeavor. The earthy clay of sculpture, the movement of the body, the notes of song — those who do them, know them.
But what is the raw material of photography? It would have been easy to say film once, but we’ve evolved. It’s popular to say light, but something feels off about that. Not because it isn’t one of our key components, it certainly is, but because it just doesn’t seem to explain everything.
An essence of an artform should feel like the thing we constantly push around in our process. It should be present throughout. In photography, light is not the only thing we wrestle with and we often “set and forget” our light determining devices in order to focus all of our energies on composition, moment or the attitude and gestures of our subjects. Light’s presence is ever, but more in the picture than in our actions.
