Photography and Unhappiness
More than most other forms of artistic endeavors, I feel like, my relationship to photos I take is about negativity. I think it's because the simple act of taking a photo is so effortless that it's really easy to disparage the result. It's not like someone performed a Concerto or something and missed a note, because to even get to the threshold of missing a single note out of an entire concerto is a fantastic display of mastery. But when a photo is bad, it's just bad. Sure it can be picked apart into elements that are or aren't working, but for the most part, it's easy to treat photos as binary. This one's good because you a scene, had an idea of a picture you wanted to take of it, and understood your positioning, the mechanics of your equipment, and the impact your change would have on the scene to successfully get the photo. If not, then it's a bad photo. And I think, for the most part, people agree with me. No one hangs onto photos because they're like "almost good". You hang onto the good ones and let the rest of them go.
In the winter of 2022-23, I visited Taiwan. My family is Taiwanese and we visited quite a bit growing up, but it was my wife's first time, and had been about 4 years for me. It was also my first real time since picking up a camera and getting into taking photos. We were celebrating a number of big milestones, reconnecting with family, eating good food, and visiting great sites. My sister and brother in law were on the trip as well, so it was shaping up to be a great vacation.
There's this weird thing that happens online that I call "context fracture". Everyone has had an experience where maybe they see a beautiful view on a hiking trail or something, they take a picture, and later when they're telling their friend how cool the hike was, you go to show them the photo, but when you pull it out, it looks kinda bland. Then you might go on instagram or something and see a travel influencer's photos of a location, and they look incredible. But then you look at their itinerary, and there was simply no way they did much there besides take the picture. But if you've visited that location, you might look at it and be reminded of your time there, maybe even better that your own photos, because the aesthetic that they captured, but didn't experience, is the one that you experienced, but didn't capture. This is what I refer to as "context fracture". You attach your context to their photo.
But the idea is for those two things to line up. You want to be able to 1. have an amazing experience somewhere, as well as 2. capture images that commemorate and hold that experience. And when I went to Taiwan, I felt like there was a lot of pressure to do that. I probably took more photos that two weeks than I have in any other month. And the entire time, I honestly felt pressure to both enjoy the trip, but also capture photos of the trip enjoyed.
The majority of the successful photography content creators travel specifically to create content, and it's really easy for that kind of photo to be the goal for non-professional photo-takers. After all, a lot of people see those photos as a source of inspiration and definition of success. So someone going on a trip can actually be motivated to engage in content-creator behavior in order to get pictures that look like they had a chill time that didn't actually have because they were running around trying to grab pictures so they can make it look like they did. In this way, one person can experience contact fracture with themselves.
On this Taiwan trip, I felt a lot of pressure to get those great photos. Taiwan is such a beautiful and incredible place, and to me, a deeply personal place. I felt like I would be deeply disappointed if I didn't get photos that reflected that. My camera was always in my hand, I felt like I couldn't let a single possible shot slip. But of course, as anyone who has tried to take photos knows, the number of shots you want to take is always greater than the number you end up being able to take, and the number you end up taking is always greater than the number than the number that turn out the way you wanted them to. This can be a pretty prevalent source of unhappiness with the picture taking process. Of course there are happy accidents, but, at least for me, they end up being much rarer than pre-meditated successes.
The kind of photos that I wanted to take was also influenced by this kind of fractured desire. Something that Taiwan excels at is the food. But food pictures are so⦠pedestrian and touristy. My pictures have to be those masterful, aesthetic pictures, so I'll take like 50 pictures of the Eternal Spring Shrine in Taroko Gorge, to make sure that I get the perfect one, but never take a food picture. The same with photos of people. I'm generally really shy about taking pictures when people can see me, so that combined with the fact that the vision of successful shots I take never really includes many photos of family, I didn't really take those either.
So the entire time I'm there, I feel all this stress of trying to get the right shots and yet still manage to be present and have a good time. And the result of all that is that now I have SD cards full of thousands of raw photos I have to cull and edit. That task alone took so, so long.
And at the end of all that, I was really unhappy. I kept thinking of the shots that I had missed. I kept being hyper-aware of the compositions that I missed, the timing I screwed up, the shots that came out over/under exposed, the shots that came out blurry. I felt like my photos were bad when compared to what I had really wanted them to be.
I finally finished editing, felt like I had to stop looking at them. I then took a multi-month break from taking photos. The whole thing just didn't really excite me anymore.
Now, over 3 years later, I finally return to the photos. The purpose of this post is digest that whole experience and understand my feelings about it.
First of all, I love my photos and I think they're amazing. I'm actually very proud of myself for getting these shots. I think that they definitely have a distinct feeling of the places in Taiwan that we visited. They feel immersive and unique. I think they're well-composed and overall represent some of the best artistic vision that I've ever had.
And I am still unhappy with them.
But now for a different reason.
The photos are too generic. The parts of that trip that my memory longs for aren't grandiose vistas or artsy decisive moments. It's my dad giving a toast at our belated, accessible wedding banquet. It's the lunch we scrapped together from 7-11 in the train station because that's all that was open. It's popping into the little book store we found in the underground mall with my sister and brother in law. The common themes here are family and food. The two things I had so much contempt for when I was actually taking pictures there.
I got bait-and-switched by my own context fracture. I was so obsessed with taking "masterful" photos that I thought would be representative of my experience, and when I finally got those photos, I disliked them, but then when I finally like them, I realized that those weren't the ones that I wanted to take in the first place because of the way they fail to reflect the actual experience so I'm unhappy with them again.
One piece of creative output that I return to again and again is a video I made in 2018 called The Octobers. It's also based in Taiwan, but is instead focused on my Uncle's stroke. It was entirely shot on a tiny camera the size of a marshmallow with a tiny lens and tiny sensor. The shots are from the hip, and often dutch at some crazy angle. Colors are pretty much ungraded.
But it's good. At this point in time I might even say it's my favorite thing of all things I've ever made. It speaks to me so deeply, and from reactions I've gotten from my family, it speaks to them too. And none of that significance comes from its aesthetic perfection.
So if technical mastery exists along one axis, and meaning along a separate axis. These two experiences are in opposite corners, being each high in one and low in the other. And the question I'm left with is where to go from here. The obvious answer is to make stuff that's in the corner that's both artistic and meaningful, but I don't know how to do that.
But I think the first step is to even be able to recognize it as a direction that I want to go in. When I take a photo that seems to move in that direction, I hope I can understand why and encourage myself to do more of that. Here are some starts.
This is my sister stamping her notebook. She loves stamps and stationary, and I think this photo shows something unique part of her resonating with a part of our trip.
My aunt has a view of Taipei 101 from the roof of her apartment building, so that's where we celebrated the new years' fireworks. We used to stay with this aunt when we visited as kids, so it was very nostalgic to be back.
This is my dad outside the battlements of a historic military base. My dad, like all Taiwanese men, was in the military, and his view of Taiwan is characterized by a lot more struggle and hardship from its military and economic past.
So yeah, I guess I want to do more of that.
