Are We Drowning in Photographs but Seeing Less?
We take photographs constantly.
Our phones are cameras. Our cameras are computers. We photograph our food, our children, our dogs, our holidays, our feet, our coffee, our art, our dinner, our bloody dinner again because the first one didn't look quite right.
And then we rarely look at most of them ever again.
That was one of the questions that came up when I was talking to photographer and artist Nigel Walker for Episode 5 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast:
Are we drowning in photographs but actually seeing less?
Nigel thinks we probably are.
And I think he has a point.
From 12 shots to hundreds
Nigel started taking photographs when he was just six years old.
His first camera was a Box Brownie, and his first photographs were of his parents. This was photography as a very different activity from the one we know today.
Film was limited.
You had to think.
If you had 12 exposures, you had 12 chances.
You couldn't stand in the park and take 147 slightly different photographs of the same thing before deciding which one you liked.
And you certainly couldn't look at the image immediately afterwards.
Nigel remembers photography as something closer to a memory machine. He photographed friends, holidays and everyday life. It was almost like keeping a visual diary.
Digital photography changed all of that.
Now you can take 100 photographs in less than an hour.
And most of them will disappear into a folder somewhere.
Photography without looking
There is something slightly strange about that.
We have become incredibly good at recording things.
But are we equally good at looking?
Nigel described how his own practice has changed. He used to go out walking with his camera and come home with perhaps 100 photographs.
Now, if he goes out with his camera, he is much more likely to have a particular idea in mind.
He might already know roughly where the photograph will be taken.
The time of day.
The weather.
The light.
The thing he is looking for.
That shift is at the heart of his idea of slow photography.
Six photographs in an hour
Nigel has run slow photography sessions where, after talking to participants about their ideas, they go out for an hour and try to take just six photographs.
Six.
Not sixty.
Not six hundred.
Six.
And suddenly you have to look.
You have to consider light and shade.
Patterns.
Composition.
Detail.
You have to notice things that you might normally walk straight past.
A yellow line at the edge of a road.
Tiny flowers pushing through cracks in the pavement.
The way light falls across an ordinary building.
The things that are always there but somehow invisible until you actually stop and look.
As Nigel put it during our conversation, you don't see unless you look.
And I think that applies to much more than photography.
The same problem exists in art
As an artist, I'm surrounded by images.
Instagram.
Pinterest.
Exhibitions.
Books.
Magazines.
Other artists' websites.
AI-generated images.
Photographs.
Paintings.
Videos.
Reels.
More images than any human could possibly properly absorb.
And sometimes I wonder whether consuming all that visual information actually makes us more visually aware—or simply more visually saturated.
There's a difference.
Looking at something isn't necessarily the same as seeing it.
And seeing something isn't necessarily the same as really noticing it.
For me, that is one of the reasons I work in series.
Repetition forces me to look again.
I'll take one subject and keep returning to it. Change the colour. Change the composition. Simplify it. Abstract it. Push it further.
The first version tells me something.
The second version tells me something else.
By the fifth or sixth version, I may finally be seeing something I didn't notice at the beginning.
We need to slow down
Perhaps this is one of the unexpected consequences of living in a world where we can record everything.
We need to become more selective about what deserves our attention.
Not everything needs to be photographed.
Not everything needs to be posted.
Not everything needs to become content.
Sometimes the point is simply to look.
To notice.
To be curious.
To stand somewhere for a few minutes and actually see what is happening around you.
And perhaps that is what slow photography is really teaching us.
Not simply how to take better photographs.
How to pay attention.
You can hear my full conversation with Nigel Walker, including our discussion about his 500 Faces project, photography, creativity and the human need to be seen, in Episode 5 of the Liz Dees Art Podcast. Click on the link below to watch the podcast.
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