Is It Important to Take a Literal or Art-Based Composition?

This is something I have thought about a great deal over a very long career and I think it gets to the heart of what photography actually is, or at least what it can be.

When I started out the expectation was largely that a photograph should be faithful. It should show you what was there. The technical craft was in capturing that faithfully, with good exposure and sharp focus and a balanced composition. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is a genuine skill and it produces genuinely beautiful work.

But somewhere along the way I began to feel that faithfulness to the scene wasn't quite the same thing as truthfulness to the experience of being in it. And that gap between the two is where I think art lives.

When I photograph the sea I am not trying to show you what the sea looks like. You have seen the sea. What I am trying to do is give you some sense of what it felt like to stand at the edge of it on that particular morning, with that particular light, in that particular state of mind. That is a very different ambition and it requires very different choices.

A longer exposure might turn the water into something almost abstract. A compressed tonal range might strip the image back until it feels more like a drawing than a photograph. The horizon might sit in a place that feels slightly wrong until suddenly it feels exactly right. None of these choices are literal. All of them are in service of something true.

I would encourage anyone who feels constrained by the idea that a photograph has to look like what was there to ask themselves what they actually felt when they were there. Because that feeling is the real subject. The scene is just where it happened.