We can’t go back. We shouldn’t go back. We’ll never go back.
Right or wrong, good or bad, agree with it or not, we are living in the very early stages of the new normal, a post-pandemic world of photography.
I am feeling it so very deeply in my bones-less breadth, more depth.
Emotional intelligence (EQ), in photography, is as important at intellectual intelligence (IQ).
I, like many of my creative fellows, want to use my camera to connect more profoundly, creatively, immeasurably, and passionately. Photography and life are beautifully intertwined.
Covid has made photography less literal, more conceptual. It is becoming less harsh, more soft. Less hobby, more habit. Less science, more art.
Instead of a blind focus and adherence to only technology and technique, we, instead, as photographers, seek, at all costs, and at all levels, convenience, simplicity, ease-of-use, straightforwardness.
Hardware.Software.Heart-ware.
We are no longer interested in just documenting life but interpreting it through our collective lenses.
We want to prolong and preserve every precious moment and memory we can experience. Click.
It’s inevitable. We seem to be returning to a gentler time of intentional photography, road-tripping and photo-walking.
Not because we have to but because we want to, and because we can. It is our joie de vivre-the buoyant and unadulterated enjoyment of life.
We seem to be closer to earth and Mother Nature.
That which we have been use to seeking outside home; we now seek closer-to-home and around-the-house.
We aren’t just interested, anymore, in only images but stories; powerful, moving, and inspiring stories, tales that change us for the better and from the inside.
The voice that we are learning to listen to, finally, is our own voice in photography.
We are letting go and letting in every rhythm, rhyme, and nuance of life and love itself.
We crave normally, authenticity, legitimacy, and genuineness.
Image quality, to most of us, has less to do what the traditional critics, curators and gatekeepers have told us, and more to do with our own sense of use, sharing.
Validation is from within, not without.
We seem to be more playful and whimsical in what we point our cameras at.
The power of physical, tactical prints is stronger than ever. We seek permanence in an impermanent world.
Covid has taught us all that life passes by at brutal and forceful speed and intensity.
Our cameras help us, in small ways, freeze time, slow life down.
This pandemic has not just changed photography but our very lives as well.
Click,
Jack
