What are photos for

Why do we feel the need to make a record of the world around us in visual form? People have been doing this for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. First with coloured slime scraped from a river bed or the floor of a cave, then with carefully prepared pigments. Now we use digital electronic devices like a smart phones and digital cameras.

To me the answer is simple. Making pictures is just part of our need to tell stories. We all do it, whether we paint, take photographs or, well, just tell stories.

One of the biggest reasons for the global success of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone invention is that it allows people to tell stories to each other. Unlike writing letters, the telephone allows us to tell stories to each other as if both people were in the same room at the same time. Little stories about our families, our health, what we have been doing. It allows two people to exchange the respective stories of their lives in a way that is easy to use and intuitive.

Biggest reason for the success of the smartphone is that it not only allows a person to share stories with one other person, it allows us to share stories with the whole world. By posting a picture and related narrative on whatever social media we prefer, we have transformed a one-to-one story telling device into a one-to-everyone story telling device. I wonder if we will still be calling this story propagating machine a phone in ten years' time.

The smart phone has already displaced the fixed position telephone device and the laptop computer for many people. Likewise it has taken away the need to take a camera when we are out and about, on vacation or visiting relatives. When was the last time you used a purpose-built camera, digital or film? If you answer this question: in the last week, month, year, you must be a dedicated photographer.

Whether you describe yourself as a photographer or not, what do you do with your photographs, now they are no longer photographs but digital images produced by an electronic image scanning device? You may use some of them to update your socials but do you consider that the primary purpose?

If you are wondering why I chose a picture of a cart, horses and riders to illustrate this article it is because I liked this result of my recent visit to an agricultural fair and wanted to make use of it. The use is purely decorative, although it also illustrates a point I am trying to make in this article.

My guess is that, if you are the kind of person who owns a camera, then you are probably the kind of person who takes care to arrange, store, crop and otherwise edit the images that result from your photography. How many people see those sorted and edited images? Unless you publish any of the images professionally, the chances are most of your photos will only be seen by you.

That being the case, please allow me to suggest another use for the images you have created. Unless you already do so, why not add to your creative skills by writing fictional or non-fiction stories using your photographs to illustrate them? Why not? You are already a visual story teller, why not extend your skills base by becoming a verbal/textual story teller too?

Writing stories, rather than just telling them to your friends and family, is simple to do. As we know, we all tell our own stories on social media. Extending that skill so that you can tell a fictional story or write a factual article in a more formal way is simplicity itself. To tell a non-fiction story, you just write a list of points in a particular order. For a fictional story you just make it up, either all of the story, or just some of it. What could be simpler than that?

Best thing is, instead of sorting, selecting and editing your pictures never to be seen again, you can now tell a story with words as well as with your pictures. Each will inform the other. So, if you are a serious photographer, become a writer too and make even more of your pictures and get them seen by many more people.

Shame on you for over-using Unsplash or Pixabay

If you are already a story teller and you routinely use run-of-the-mill Unsplash and Pixabay images instead of making pictures with your pocket-sized story telling device (smartphone) and then using them, then shame on you!

Start thinking of those stories you write as having another dimension. A visual dimension. The illustration is not just there to help people find your story, or to make them want to read it, it is there to help you

TELL THE STORY

Thanks for reading