Ways Of Sharing

To be human is to be creative

Fig 6. Donmouth view (Kodak Ektar 100 on a Voigtlander Bessa I)

I've written previously about my attempts to find a sense of peace and connectedness through taking photos with old cameras. More recently I've been thinking about sharing those images and through them how to communicate something worthwhile.

I've included some of my recent photos in this post and I'll also share more on a dedicated webpage in the coming weeks along with some information and advice for anyone who wants to start their own analogue photography journey.

It's tempting to conclude that in this age of anxiety, perpetuated in no small part by our fretful need to electronically overshare, we'd be happier just taking photos and keeping them to ourselves. Who needs yet another photo in a cultural landscape so saturated with images?

Without wanting to sound like a pound shop peddler of rose tinted glasses, things were better in the old days. But that's not to say it's all the fault of these modern-age social media upstarts. It's a change which was already underway while Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, was still in nappies.

In his book Hidden Agendas legendary journalist John Pilger gives a detailed account of the changes which the British press began to go through in the 1980s. Funding for investigations was redirected towards lifestyle reporting. This was the age of the Sunday supplements. Well researched investigations into serious matters which had major ramifications for people's lives were out, cookery, fashion, and travel were in.

Social media companies may have taken banality to new lows, but they didn't start the fire.

As a consequence of this neoliberal drive away from quality and towards quantity, much of the information to which we're now subjected by an increasingly small cluster of tech behemoths is simply decontextualised, hyperbolic, melodramatic, irrelevant noise posing as important cultural conversations.

Fig 7. Smash Your TV, Torry, Aberdeen, 2024 (Kodak 400TX on a Rollei 35B)

In 1999, the year I left home to study for a film and photography degree, one of the biggest news stories was the threat of the Millennium Bug. Every news outlet in Britain was running story after story about the near certainty that come midnight on the first day of the new year the world's computer systems would stop working. Planes would fall from the sky, power grids would shut down, the stock exchange would crash; in short it was to be the end of the world as we knew it.

It won't have escaped your attention that none of this happened. The fact that none of these things were ever likely to happen didn't seem to bother many journalists that year. This total non-event was in no small part the result of desperate journalists scrabbling for content. Noise. Anything to fill the airwaves. Anything to keep nervous newspaper editors happy when 24-hour TV news was gathering pace and the dawn of social media was just around the corner.

We now upload an estimated 350 million photos a day to Facebook alone. Self-styled citizen journalists rather than filling the void left by the neoliberal gutting of previously principled newspapers such as the Daily Mirror, spend more time concocting ever more ludicrous conspiracy theories, hampering missing person investigations, and further upsetting victims of crime. The hyperindividualist values of Thatcherism have been taken to new self-interested lows by the era's children and its children's children.

I am one of those children. 25 years ago when I began formally studying the media, new high quality digital cameras were becoming more affordable than ever. Flickr, the online photo sharing platform, was launched only months after I graduated. YouTube was launched the following year. It felt like we were on the brink of a media democracy. Of course, we weren't.

For the most part, we didn't use these new technologies to communicate anything particularly meaningful. It all went very Nathan Barley very quickly.

As so often happens with new technology, it's inevitably put to service in the interests of a few incredibly rich people, primarily to advance their already extortionate wealth rather than for any sort of public good. AI is of course currently best known for taking over the invaluable work of artists, rather than alleviating the drudgery of cleaning our toilets.

Feelings of hopelessness, loneliness, and melancholia are perfectly understandable reactions to the social traumas of modern capitalism. Traumas such as having our creative voices crushed. It's therefore essential that we do everything we can to build communities of care in which we support each other to narrate our experiences in the context of current social conditions.

That's why the tempting conclusion that everything would be better if we just cut ourselves off from the world must be resisted.

Fig 8. People: Pile Them High, Sell Them Cheap (Ilford Ortho Plus on a Rollei 35B)

To be human is to be creative. Included in this inherent creativity is the need to share. So any forces, external or internal, which prevent us from fully realising our creative potential are oppressive and dehumanising. Denying ourselves the opportunity to participate fully in creative life can therefore never be a good defence against assault by the forces of banality.

That's not to say that sharing what we've created is any easier than bringing it into the world in the first place.

Sharing something we've made, especially something such as a photo which is usually meant to be looked at, studied, examined, or interpreted rather than say sat on, climbed on, or thrown is to expose ourselves to the judgement of others.

This means making ourselves vulnerable of

course, but it's important to remember that feeling vulnerable, uncomfortable, unsure, or nervous isn't the same as being harmed.

A happy and healthy society is one in which we're confident in sharing our art, safe in the knowledge that while we might receive uncomfortable feedback, our work will be treated with the respect and dignity that it deserves.

To share is to put things into the hands of a community whose feedback can lead to improvement. The next time we share something similar, we refine it based on what we've learned from others. If the audience as well as the creator have taken time to develop their creative communication skills then these exchanges can lead to all sorts of positive innovation and growth.

We all have the capacity to do this. Refining that capacity into an ability is essential and something we must learn on the job. If we retreat from sharing then we limit our opportunity to practice creative communication and risk becoming self-absorbed reactionaries.

The trick to creative refinement is getting the balance right between a retreat into silence at one extreme and non-stop, ill-considered oversharing at the other.

Fig 9. Walk and Talk (Fuji 200 on a Rollei 35B)

One of the best ways I've discovered is to slow down. While I've written before about slowing down while taking photos, the same goes for sharing them. None of the photos in this post were taken quickly. I spent between 1 and 4 hours in each location, walking around and thinking not only about technical aspects such as framing and composition but also about where I was, who was around me, and what I might want to say about that in my photos.

If we want to create pictures of any worth, then it's not enough to develop ourselves as photographers. We have to develop ourselves as people. With everything I've shot for this project I've tried to be present in the moment before lifting the camera. I've tried to connect with the environment, whether that's sand on a beach, graffiti on a wall, or people out for a walk.

While writing this blog I've tried to take the same approach; posting only every few weeks, doing a lot of reading around the subject I want to write about, drafting and redrafting before sharing the final article.

If we take the time to think about what we're trying to say and how best to say it then we can avoid hairdryering our audience. When the reader, or viewer is overwhelmed by information they experience a kind of tuning out. Effectiveness is lost as the brain reacts to the delivery method instead of the content. Rather than posting 100 near-identical photos of the same sunset, pick just the best one and post that. Looking through our photos, rejecting the worst ones, selecting the best ones, thinking about what we're going to share before we share it all takes time. But it's time well spent if it means we get to make more meaningful connections with other people.

And if this project has been about anything that's probably it. After leaving a dysfunctional workplace with a toxic boss, I wanted to reconnect with a way of working which prioritised thoughtfulness and care. Importantly though I wanted to produce a blog, webpage, and series of photos which prove that working slowly and carefully should not be equated with a lack of productivity. What it should come down to is not how much we produce, but how good it is.

The world is full of people like my old boss. People who equate success with quantity. We have to reject their way of thinking. Only by being thoughtful, compassionate, and present in the moment can we improve our chances of sharing with the world not more frantic noise but things which matter, which have significance, and which might even help to restore some of our fractured humanity.