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| Stuff. |
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| Not much stuff. |
I like getting close-up photos of moving trains (like the one on the left), such pictures can be dramatic and technically challenging to accomplish. But I think it's good to include the surrounding environment too. Railroads don't operate in a vacuum. The above photograph shows the train, grade crossing (implied), cattle guard, the name of the ranch the tracks go through, mailboxes, desert flora, the name of the road crossing the tracks, rolling stock, a locomotive with the door open (indicating the train has stopped), and plenty of sky. Such details anchor the photo in time and space, making it more interesting to more people, and perhaps useful to viewers in years to come. Pictures should say more than their captions. It's not an either/or question, both kinds of shots are good, and it's usually a matter of circumstances as to what kind of shot I take. In this instance, I could have easily walked onto the grade crossing and shot the train head-on, but I wanted all that stuff in the picture. The stuff adds a rural, Southwestern dimension.
We live in an era that makes it tempting to remove stuff from our photos, making a cleaner shot, perhaps, but also a more sterile one. If you Photoshop out all the stuff you don't like in a picture (utility poles, trash, cars, people, etc.), your photograph becomes a work of fiction. There's nothing wrong with photographing fiction, but, like writing, it should be labeled as such.
Many years ago, there was a photographer named
John Collier, who, more or less, invented a field of work known as visual anthropology. The thing about Collier is that he showed that such work didn't have to be strictly utilitarian, he took great pictures that were loaded with useful data. When photographing the world as it is, stuff and data are, oftener than not, synonymous.
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| Would this picture of a stove, by John Collier, be more interesting without the people in it? |
