My motifs back then
I recently took a little trip back in time to my early days with analogue photography. Part of my „winter photo season“ this year (spending time with the photos I’ve taken) is going through my prints (physical photos) of films I’ve shot. To check which photos are worth showing. Since my prints and negative film strips were only semi-sorted and my films were even still in the developing bags from the drugstores, it was also my goal to get a proper overview: to sort the strips and prints, number them, put strips in appropriate sleeves. I love it (no lie!)!
And as I try to recognise the motifs on the negatives and leaf through the prints, I realise that I have mainly photographed people. Friends, family members, myself. I wasn’t shy about pointing the camera at people at all. This fact made quite an impression on me.
Nowadays I have a barrier to photograph people, and I am currently learning to overcome this because of my interest in self/portrait photography. I admire myself for the normality with which I photographed the people in my life back then. Since I’ve been taking amateur photography more seriously again, i.e. since this blog has been around, I observe that I’ve been more attracted to motifs in nature or in objects. I’m thinking of my popcorn photos 😀
But I’ve actually been attracted to these motifs for quite a long time because ever since I’ve started using Instagram (just a few years after I started doing film photography), I’ve also been posting mainly these kind of motifs there. Almost never people. At some point, I didn’t want to show myself anymore; there have hardly been any photos of me on the internet in recent years. The awareness and need for privacy certainly played a role in how it developed. And this is a good thing.
One of my motivations for taking photos is to capture a motif so well that it is worth seeing and worth to be shown subsequently. And not just to one person in my surrounding but to a few more – such as the internet, with Instagram (or other social media) being an optimal platform. But if you take yourself back from it and the platform disappears, somehow the drive to take such pictures also disappears. And then it became strange and very unfamiliar to photograph people. Most probably this way is better than the other way around.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are some photos that I would take again today in the same or similar way. As if I had taken them within the last few years. I can see my common photographic thread in these pictures. This makes me happy and proud. Knowing that part of my aesthetic hasn’t got lost. Now these pictures just have to make their way into the digital world.
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