I don't understand but I keep trying

Since the beginning, a huge part of my photography journey is studying other people’s photos. While doing that, I often try to examine what exactly makes me feel the way I feel so that I can notice that feeling while I’m out with my camera. Sometimes I see things and I immediately ‘get’ them even if I’m unable to emulate them myself – certain genres are inherently self-explanatory. However, at other times, I see things, I believe I understand them… but in fact, I don’t.

Case in point

I love street photography.

On the surface, it looks like a straightforward genre. Pick whatever camera you have, go out, and take whatever you encounter around you. Happy people wearing colorful clothes in crowds wearing the same boring dark jackets. Municipal service workers doing mundane jobs. Taxi drivers waiting for their fare. Food couriers with huge cubicle-shaped backpacks. Ordinary people doing ordinary things typical for the place and time they’re in.

A lot of my excitement about street photography has to do with the fact I love big cities. I grew up in a tiny town where I knew every single street, so I quickly run out of things to explore. But I always loved travelling to places different than my hometown. I would count trolleybuses, look at multi-lane roads, think about all those venues that weren’t present in my area. It felt like a journey.

In early 2010s I moved to Warsaw. I knew I landed in a place that would never stop giving. It was far too immense for me to fully explore and understand within my lifetime.

Street photography is a natural consequence of all of that. I love exploring. I love observing.

Learning from the best

I love watching documentaries and looking at photography from the bygone eras. Not only do they provide me with a window into places and times I never had a chance to experience myself, but they also offer insight into how artists perceived the reality around them and the nature of their craft.

Henri Cartier-Bresson taught me the importance of ‘the decisive moment’. He taught me to anticipate, compose, stay patient and trust my intuition.

Vivian Maier taught me to be a ‘spy’ of the world, just loving the process and caring little about fame and appreciation (would she have signed up for Instagram if she were alive today?).

William Eggleston taught me to photograph ‘the boring’. To take pictures of whatever is there wherever I happen to be. To appreciate my own experience and let it shape my vision.

Martin Parr taught me to bring a little humor and grotesque into all of that.

Professor Hines taught me there’s a point to take street photos with focal lengths as unusual as 85mm, particularly given my shy, introverted nature.

Each and every person whose photos I’ve ever seen brought something unique to the way I see things myself.

But where am I?

Here’s a problem though. Too often I look at bodies of work by established pros of the craft. And in many cases, I look at wrong things. It’s way too easy for me to mistake artistic expression or technical quality for the sense of nostalgia those old photos offer.

It is 2024. I live in the era when people have cameras in their pockets. In the era of social media. In the era where every single spot on Earth and quite a few in space was photographed at least once or twice.

When I go out to the streets of my city, I often fail to notice the interesting. I see people, buildings, movement, but I fail to find compelling stories behind all of that.

My photos are often indistinguishable from random snapshots done by tourists.

I feel stuck because everything feels so ordinary, so mundane, so boring. I’ve seen all of that millions of times. I feel I have nothing interesting to add to the conversation. And when I try, there’s always something I could have done better if only I had noticed it earlier.

Am I supposed to spend hours looking for that one special shot?

Am I supposed to keep photographing people’s backs, silhouettes, shadows?

Am I supposed to look for puddles and take mirrored reflections all the time?

Am I supposed to spray and pray?

What’s the meaning of all of this?

Social media doesn’t help

Some time ago on Instagram, I made it a point to connect with other photography enthusiasts like myself. In 2024, if you’re starting from scratch, there’s only one way to make it happen: upload a few of your photos and pay the almighty algorithmic god of Meta to put them in front of more eyeballs. The good thing is that it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to achieve interesting effects. The bad thing is that it feels like a form of extortion: in no reasonable world should I be forced to pay to discover specific content on the site.

Nonetheless, that worked. I didn’t care about likes or follows. I cared about finding actual people who were in love with the craft. People who were doing the same thing as me in their own places of living. I gathered a sizable group of fantastic people from various parts of the world.

While that was an interesting exercise, there was something intoxicating about it. Instagram, just as any other social media product these days, is heavily optimized for engagement, sometimes in incredibly obnoxious ways. It’s too easy to mistake the amount of likes and follows for quality. It’s way too easy to be jealous and forget nobody’s truly happy in that economy. Everybody has some sort of glass ceiling they want to break. That struggle never ends.

But the worst thing is that it’s way too easy to get inspired by wrong things. It’s way too easy to follow whatever meta is fashionable these days. It’s way too easy to do the same boring things as everybody else.

I don’t want to be another photographer snapping random people on the metro. I don’t want to capture people’s backs. I don’t want to take random travel-blogger-style snapshots. I don’t want to emulate whatever fashionable trend is in vogue.

(also, Instagram stinks and you should all subscribe to Pewdie… I mean my photography corner on Pixelfed)

I don’t know how to do this, but I keep trying

And here I am, writing this down, because I can’t find anyone to have a mature discussion about this kind of stuff.

The silver lining is that nothing in my life depends on photography. I don’t use it pay my bills. I don’t have quotas to meet. I can literally do whatever I want whenever I want and that’s liberating.

So I keep trying. I go out and hang around in the same old places of the city I love. Or I go out and explore the unknown. I keep looking for my own ways of expression in all of that.

But that doesn’t change the fact I don’t understand what exactly I’m doing and what I want to achieve. And it’s gonna take a while till I figure that out.

If only that was about street photography and nothing else in my life.