Why We Make Photographs

Because I would never ask you all to do something I wouldn’t do myself, here is my way-too-long rendition of my own reasons for why. Summary at the top, with my explanations at length below.

TL;DR: Why We Make Photographs

• To preserve memory: Photographs act as anchors, helping us reconnect with people, places, emotions, and experiences that would otherwise change or fade even more over time.
• To communicate across linguistic boundaries: Photography is a visual language that can carry meaning between people without requiring a shared spoken language.
• To participate in the defining medium of our time: Images are central to how we now share information, build relationships, tell stories, and understand the world.
• To become more observant: The practice of photography trains us to notice light, detail, beauty, pattern, and the rich meaning imbued in everyday life.
• To hold time still: A photograph preserves a fraction of a second, allowing us to study and experience a moment long after it has passed.

To understand the “how” of making photographs, I think it is essential that we first understand the “why.” These topics are inextricably intertwined, and by starting with the motivating reasons, we can more easily engage with the technical experience of making compelling photographs.

Naturally, everyone has their own reasons for making photographs. For this first exercise, I want you to find yours — take some time out of your week and sit, with no distractions, and plumb the depths of your mind for your own reasons.

I have done this over the years, in many different phases of my practice, and for the sake of thought starters — and to stimulate the conversation in a variety of directions — I’ll lay out some of the frameworks I’ve built when thinking about my own motivations. There are no right answers, no universal truths here, just ideas borne from reflection and introspection, thoughts I’ve found scattered along the winding paths I’ve walked to get to where I am now. I’m curious to hear your own, and feel free to use my own ideation as a springboard for yours.

A Photograph Is a Catalyst for a Cascade of Memories

This is a phrase I’ve orbited and refined over decades of my practice, and it is rooted in my love for visual imagery as well as my understanding of how memory really works. In college, I studied evolutionary psychology, and that education is foundational to my understanding of how the human mind works. One thing that stuck with me is the experiments on how memories form, how they are recalled and reconstructed, and how they warp and change through the lens of our updated experiences. Famously, studies have been done on “flashbulb” memories that reveal even our most visceral recollections are largely inaccurate reconstructions. To put it more casually — every time you remember something you are actually reconstructing that memory from parts that are also changing, as you do, like a game of telephone with yourself, where over the years your memory of your own life is different from the reality you actually lived. This is largely adaptive and likely very useful in the consolidation of experience so that life makes more narrative sense — turning a world of random chaos into a navigable, survivable life.

I say all this to say that for me, photographs are anchors — records, pulled like slides from time — that pin my own wildly changing narratives to at least an echo of time and space, and they seem to activate my neural networks around specific moments and life experiences. Because of my near-feverish documentation of my life experience, I have a dense visual record — I can see a photograph I don’t even remember taking, and remember who I was with, how I felt, where we went next, and a rich galaxy of memories that swirl around that center of gravity. How accurate that galaxy is, of course, is up for debate, but one reason I like to make photographs is because I enjoy the experience of those networks lighting up.

TL;DR — photographs create a visual record that helps our memories stay closer to anchors of reality, and can activate the narrative experience of our own lives. One of the best parts about this is that it is also a gift you can give to other people. I cherish the opportunity to preserve important moments for people — and my work becomes anchors for their own memories.

Photography Is a Universal Language

There is an idea that war breaks out in the silence between peoples. When we know each other, we are less likely to create conflict. Sharing our sense of sight is a beautiful way to know each other.

Communication is everything to an interconnected species like ours. We are completely socially dependent on each other, we rely on each other for everything, and our ability to cooperate is why we have been so successful in our environment — successful enough to change that environment to suit the evolution of our needs. When communication breaks down, so do we.

Photographs need no translation. Someone who speaks no English can take meaning from an image I make, and I can take meaning embedded in the work of someone whose language I don’t know. In this way, visual language is universal, and it is a way to fill that silence between us with beauty and meaning, drawing us closer, and closing gaps that could otherwise fill with conflict.

Furthermore — all written language is actually imagery. I love to cite the famous — if counterintuitive — fact that we actually read words as full images, not as ordered sequences of letters. For example:

As lnog as the fsrit and lsat ltertes in any seuqnece of wrods taht cmospoe a pgarparah are the smae, it dseon’t mtaetr wehre in the wrods the oehtr ltertes flal, bceasue yuor bairn atclulay raeds ecah wrod cnhuk as a ditsinct iagme, and you can raed the jmulbed up txet as esaliy as you cluod raed the “nromal” odrer.

Weird, I know — and it goes to show that our visual system is incredibly powerful. Communicating with images is a high-bandwidth way to get your ideas across to someone else — whether those ideas are literal and factual as scientific slides, or metaphorical and poetic as expressions of your emotion.

Images Are the Prevailing Medium of Our Time

Not only are images an efficient way to pass ideas between people — they are increasingly the most prevalent way. Even leaving out our assertion that written words are images, the ability to communicate with rich visual imagery is more important than ever in the age of interconnected network technology that augments our own minds. Almost everyone you encounter in modern society has both a screen and a camera on them at all times — our news, our social experiences, our humor, our calls to friends and family, and an endless list of other examples depend on our ability to communicate visually.

If you are good at making images, if you practice the effective communication of ideas with visual information, you have an advantage in a society that is so dependent on that very skill. When I started as a photographer, my mentors and those I looked up to would often decry the advent of the smartphone, saying, “if everyone is a photographer, no one is a photographer.” In that moment, I realized…

If everyone is a photographer, everyone is a photographer.

My instinct was the opposite of their fear — the democratization of the medium would be a boon to us all. If photography became more essential to everyday communication, visual literacy would skyrocket, and our skills would be more in demand than ever. My conviction in that idea was the thing that gave me a career in photography — I doubled down on networks like Instagram, decided as a foundational principle that I would be open with my knowledge, and trusted that a general rise in participation in the craft could only benefit the most passionate amongst us.

The importance of visual imagery in all these areas only continues to increase — every screen is an infinitely refreshing canvas for your creative effort — and with the rise of generative AI, that trend will only continue, up and to the right. Being positioned as a master of visual language is an incredibly beneficial place for you to be — especially if you love to do it.

The More You Notice, the More You Notice

This is one of my favorite reasons to make images. The world is shockingly beautiful. It is a miracle we are here at all, with a depth of consciousness that can turn towards our own experience and marvel at its complexity. To photograph is to study, to study is to learn, to learn is to appreciate. For me the depth of that study and appreciation reaches a near-religious level of admiration and eagerness for more, and best of all, that hunger and curiosity for visual experiences overflows into every aspect of my life. It makes me pay more attention to everything — to how I cook, how I show up for friends, how I express my love and my gratitude for others — how I think about EVERYTHING, from the most abstract existential questions to the smallest, most mundane details. That curiosity about the world makes the world infinitely richer. It slows down time. It quite literally fills me with awe and gratitude to be present to observe the world around me.

Photography is the art of observation. It is your ticket to a lifelong journey of curiosity and wonder, and even as a hobby it is the most worthy of pursuits — forming your practice around this intention will make your life expand and unfold in front of you in all its fractal beauty.

Hold Time and Space Still

Photography is the only way to hold time and space still, so you can spend more time with one instant that is normally gone before you have time to explore what that moment looks and feels like. Every millisecond is replaced by the one right after; to make an image allows you to hold those slices still and see what else is happening within that infinitesimally small window of time. In my project Drip Drop, comprised of high-speed photographs of rain hitting puddles in Times Square, each moment only exists for the smallest sliver of time — but by making photographs I am able to transfix these slivers into textured, visual sculptures that preserve the expression of the unfolding universe, as if held in amber.

Most other forms of visual study of the world unfold over longer periods of time. Photography is unique in its ability to capture the instant itself, for further study.

I could write ad infinitum about this topic, but for now, that concludes Lesson 1. If you’d like to share your own thoughts with me, write them in the form below and send them my way to start a dialogue. I always value and appreciate the opinions of people who engage with my thoughts here.