Sunday, October 26, 2008
Photography and Theology
Photography was not a hobby that ever really appealed to me. I could appreciate a good photograph - a nice composition, the stark textures revealed in a black-and-white - but I was always skeptical of photography as a “real” art form. After all, anyone can take a photograph, and if you take enough photos, eventually one will be great. When I perused a gallery, I’d often see “abstract” photos that looked like someone had an accident with developer. Photography just never cranked my tractor.
Then a couple of years ago I read about pinhole cameras, and how easy it was to make one. I looked at some photos made with circular cameras on the internet and decided that the next time we emptied an oatmeal box I would turn it into a camera.
This has been a lot of fun. I like the really long exposure times, which run from anywhere from a couple of seconds to several hours. I like the distortion you can impose on a picture. I like the fact that you are using the simple principles of lightwaves moving through a hole to make a picture.
I like pinhole photography because of its distortions and accidents. Fast-moving objects disappear completely. Slower-moving people turn into ghosts. A curved camera warps the visible space.
I ponder these images and ask, “are these really distortions? Or are they simply another facet of reality?” The photo paper doesn’t lie. This is a record of photons traveling through a hole at a particular angle at a particular time. These photos record movement. Viewed from outside of time, perhaps human beings don’t look like the flesh-and-blood creatures we know, but trails of light, snaking in and around each other and their environments. I’ve also wondered about what human beings would look like in geologic time. I imagine time-lapse photos of cities rising from pristine valleys and crumbling into heaps of stone again and again.
As I’ve learned more about the ins and outs of making photos and developing them, I’ve come to see how complex photography is. To get a good portrait, you cannot merely freeze someone’s face in a certain way. You have to capture our experience of their face. The face is fluid. It never stays still. The eyes blink, the mouth contorts, the nostrils flare. You can take a hundred pictures and never get one that “captures” someone’s face, because our idea of their face is a composite of all of their expressions, idiosyncrasies, and angles.
So I’ve come to appreciate photography more by getting down to the basics. Lighting. Perspective. Framing. Composition. Texture. To me, these are the very things that also make good theology. The other thing is that about 90% of the time, the results aren’t that great. But it’s the learning, and the rare occasion of getting it right that has more to do with luck, or chance, or grace, that makes it fun.
