Q&A

I spend a lot more time thinking about photography than actually doing photography.  The other day I had a bit of a shower-thoughts moment and started wondering:

When you take a photo, are you asking a question, or answering a question?

People always say that when you take a photo, you should be telling a story. Is the story already there when you take the photo, or does it only become a story after you hit the shutter button?

I didn't get around to really thinking it through until now.

#nyc

A photo posted by Jason Cheung (@fickle_frame) on Jun 6, 2015 at 4:22pm PDT

The story is there! It's just waiting for the right storyteller to come along and assign it importance in our lives (or our Facebook feeds, for that matter).  Think of all the stories you walk past on the way to work -- all they needed was someone to point them out to you. Of course, you have more important things to get to than other people's business. That's where the storyteller comes in. He/she captures the story and puts it into his preferred language, be it words or pictures or song or sculpture. His/her hope is that the audience is able to understand the language. 

A good story makes us ask questions we didn't even know we wanted answered, and then leaves us to seek the answers ourselves.

So, to answer the question at hand (at least for me), when a photo is taken, there will be questions, but they are not for the photographer to ask or answer.  The photographer is only there to make the questions happen.