Saturday, August 16, 2008

What is the value (meaning) of a photo?

Most of my photos fall into two categories: family photos and landscape/nature photos. (There is a third, much smaller category, photos of various things.)

These two categories have been constant as long as I have made photos. (Since being 15 years old or so.) All in all I have shot about 11,000 photos, of which 9,000 are recent, taken with my Ixus digital camera.

When I still used film, shooting a photo was a much more deliberate thing. Often I decided not to take a photo at the last second. Nowadays it is the other way around: taking a photo just in case.

The family photos are personal, taken because of personal reasons. Of the other photos I don't really know how they will survive time. Perhaps I'll decide to get rid of them at some point. Of perhaps I'll save them because of documentary reasons.

In any case, there probably isn't much artistic value in the non-personal photos, at least not so much as to make them worth saving for a longer time. They are more like the practise of writing - scratch pieces which are best forgotten afterwards.

What about other types of non-personal photographs, such as street photography or abstract photography. Would these survive better than amateur landscape/nature photos? Well, I think it mostly depends on the skill of the photographer.

But perhaps photos which have people in them survice time best. In not else, they at least have a documentary function.

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