Taking vs Making
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it”.
- Ansel Adams
The wind and the cold are at their most biting just before dawn, and yet right there, atop a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada, is where you would find Ansel in his prime, hunting for the perfect light. Having travelled to a suitable spot before sunrise amidst pockets of snow stubbornly resisting the spring melt and setting up an extremely heavy and bulky camera must have surely felt like an act on of making to him, and when referring to the physical act of fabrication, the brilliant American landscapist certainly isn’t wrong. Speaking from his point of view as a master craftsman, there was much that he made as physical objects. But to me that is what he was, a craftsman, a particularly ingenious tradesperson who used a systematic approach to achieve a canon of perfection expected of a master maker. His photographs impress me immensely and simultaneously give me absolutely nothing.
Today the expression has been hijacked and distorted in a different sense. It’s become a statement of assertion of intent of the photographer, an exercise in intellectual vanity. An authoritarian stamp of intellectual protection of it’s creator. It is a fundamental statement of fact about the medium that a great photograph can be created, wholly or partly, by accident. That is deeply dissatisfying to anyone who spends time tuning and refining their eye, their sensitivity and their skill, that their efforts might be surpassed by a mere act of chance. This is where the inferiority complex photography has always suffered from starts to creep in, surely a true art cannot be created by a combination of randomness and the act of ‘being there, at that time’.
I disagree with this profoundly, it disrespects the very essence of what is photography. The invention of photography has battled against our greatest adversary, the largest, most dominant force in all our lives: the unstoppable passage of time. With photography we have snatched, with gleeful irreverence, something from the plane of the infinitely moving and consigned it to the plane of the infinitely stationary. This is the greatest act of deicide humans have ever committed. To kill time is to kill every God we have ever invented. A beautiful act of revolution that is worth celebrating, it’s worth more than the vanity of making explicit an intentional moment of creation. “Taking” speaks of the human spirit and it’s battle against the elements and the universe. Having been taken, a photograph cannot be returned to the continuum of time, it is human forever more, stamped with our desire to live beyond our years. I honour that spirit and will very proudly continue to take photographs. The making for me is what I do with the photographs I take.
“God remains dead. And we have killed him”
- Friedrich Nietzsche