On the Usefulness of Photography

Searching for a good photo in the every-day of life teaches us to notice our surroundings more.

A lot of people think that photography disconnects the viewer from the world, imagining for instance the person holding their phone at a concert, but I think often it’s the opposite. Practicing photography compels you to ponder what is meaningful and beautiful in your surroundings. Once you gain this aesthetic self-discovery, it stays with you for

what you should be recording are not the destination events of life so much as the much more mundane things: rainy mornings, making cookies, the process of building a shed or starting a garden, or your child trying to learn to brush his teeth.

These days it is possible to live particularly disembodied existences, enabled by environments and transportation so comfortable you can wear flip-flops in New England all winter long if you want to. My hope is that the quest every day for a good photo causes you to be outdoors and on foot more. On foot it is impossible to remain out of touch.

If you are motivated, you may become so dissatisfied with your environment that you decide to remake it more beautifully. With daily photography, this may happen often, usually when you want to take a picture of something and the background is incredibly messy so you decide to pick up!

observation is a skill to be developed, and a necessary one before understanding aesthetics.

Digital photo collections have enormous value as your personal shoeboxes, and once you’ve taken at least a photo a day for a few years its surprisingly rewarding to look back on even recent history. I have found that just casually looking back helps me recall large amounts from those years. It also helps one notice what’s important. Once you have

Learning to be on the lookout for beautiful things is a way of contesting the relentlessly rationalistic view of the world that surrounds us. Just as we produce thoughts by talking things over, we produce memories by composing them and reflecting. By taking lots of photos you may come to find more things you cherish.

Less obviously, one’s photo-a-day catalog creates a large improvement to memory. Just as hearing a few lyrics can recall to you an entire song, having a catalog of photos that spans years allows you to easily recall what was happening say, two years ago this time, or how some project was going, or remind you just how long it took, or that it happe