“What you know” is a constantly progressing body of information, updating and evolving and adapting with every experience in our lives. What I know today is less than I will know tomorrow, to an unknowable degree.
Advice to “photograph what you know” seems to come from a common piece of advice to writers, to “write what you know.” In this context it is a direction towards authenticity – be true to yourself, write from your experiences, write what you know.
Writing is very deliberate and introspective – the writer may be writing on any topic, but it is filtered through their interpretation into language. Whatever the photographer may or may not have experienced, every word comes from them; their internal voice becomes the written word, and the reader interprets the meaning from those words.
In photography the camera most often points outward, directly towards a subject without the filtration process that comes from interpreting the real world into the world of language in words. This means that a superficial glance can become a significant photograph without the photographer ever really thinking much about what they have photographed beyond “this looks nice”.
Photographing outwards, looking beyond the bubble of ego, means a photographer can quite easily photograph a situation that is entirely outside of “what they know”. A photograph can be made literally by accident, with zero intent, and the lens can be pointed with aesthetic intent while ignoring any deeper connotation that frame may end up containing.
Advice to “photograph what you know” can seem like a way to preclude or exclude the potential for photographs that are separate in some way from the photographers’ experience. A photograph that contains a language you don’t understand, culture you’ve never participated in, or an experience you’ve never had would be the opposite of photographing what you know – they are photographs containing elements you “don’t know”!
With writing the filter of experience to language happens via interpretation and retransmission, whereas with photography no real interpretation is necessary in order to retransmit. Where a writer must find words that fit their thoughts and feelings a photographer can share an image with the world that they haven’t really thought about at all.
A photographer can reach out through a lens and make a photograph of a total stranger, living a life totally outside the photographers’ frame of reference or understanding, a subject they have never seen before and may never see again after pressing the shutter, someone they never touch or speak to, someone they truly know nothing about aside from what they look like at that exact time in that exact place.
How much can the photographer really tell us about that person in their photograph, aside from what they look like? Certainly no depth or real information – only pure speculation would be on offer. With solely visual cues/information the likelihood is that the content depicted/connoted will be archetypal, or stereotypical to those visible aspects.
On the other hand, choosing to not photograph outside of your knowledge can mean an aversion to photographing anything that isn’t included in the criteria of what you feel makes you you – avoiding including unfamiliar peoples, cultures, fashions, objects, and concepts in your work. Even if done for the reason of leaving it to a community to document themselves, and self define “legitimately”, what I think this actually results in is an echo chamber; what you know feeding back into what’s known, without the potential for information beyond what’s known.
I think this idea of self-documentation is superficial and based on perhaps a view of the world and society that is clinically denominated and demarcated, and does not take into account the interconnected nature of existence. Humans do not meaningfully exist in bubbles categorized by labels outside of a sociological/anthropological perspective. Humans exist in relation to everything else, which in turn is in relation to humanity.
Every relationship represents a potential for seeing the world in a different way: my perspective as an English-born citizen towards a political debate in a township in America may be different than that of a resident there, which may be different from the perspective of someone from a neighboring area. We relate to one another and the issue in different ways based on different contextual building blocks, all of which contribute to the sheer diversity of the human experience. In the same way, the relationship I have with the world outside of me is different to the relationship the world outside of me has with me.
The nuance of recognizing this web of relationships can be overlooked, and as a result people lean into the echo chamber of apparent legitimacy, taking photographing what they know at face value. I think this is an extreme response to a very literal interpretation of the often-valid criticism against “parachute practitioners”.
A parachute practitioner is someone who drops into a location as an outsider or tourist, photograph the visual aspects they expect to see/are already looking for, don’t pause to do any further research or delve under the surface level, and produce results that offer little insight. Archetypal/stereotypical reinforcement is common, as only the pure visuals are what are being worked with – slim chance of such a photographer showing any kind of fresh interpretation or perspective.
The result of this approach may involve amplification of tropes, or a “preaching to the choir” of sorts. If you photograph something that is already known, you hear a story or learn about a place, and then go and make your own images that tell the same story, or show the place, without furthering the contribution, then you’re just parroting information you already got from somewhere else, reflecting steps someone else has already taken. Instead of adding or augmenting knowledge you have appropriated someone else’s legwork in order to put material in your portfolio.
If you dedicate your time to photographing a project that says nothing new or interesting or in a reframed way, and you have not much to say about why you did it, or why in that way, then what’s the point? Why should anyone, even you, be interested? What’s actually on offer there?
Instead of fostering tactics of antipathy to avoid such an approach, instead of restricting your field of view and restricting what you allow yourself to photograph I would take this potential for lackluster-at-best workflow and results as a catalyst for expansion. A mindset which accepts growth and development, and which positions photography as a tool which enables and refines such a learning process.
Photography in this way has a purpose as part of a wider practice of experiencing the world; not aimless aesthetic first, but as a consequence of actively seeking to develop an understanding, and retransmit that understanding via a visual medium. I’ve written about this idea before, about how observation is different from investigation, and the role each plays in my workflow.
If a photographer wants to document using their knowledge and experience then that is a significant contextual frame for experiencing that work. If they want to crowdsource from others’ experience, that is also a contextual framework – but it’s worth being aware that it’s still being produced from a starting point of actively looking for a result and fitting that result to the research agenda. Research decisions are reflective of the researcher.
If you set out with the main goal of furthering what you know, a genuine journey of discovery, and use photography to document that firsthand experience in order to filter down and produce a message from that, then you will not be restricted by the idea of photographing what you know – because what you know now includes what you didn’t know. Using the camera as a sponge for firsthand accounts, both your own and other people’s, means that the basis for what you know is more secure than one reliant on secondhand research and interpretation – possibly even interpretation of other people’s photographs.
Contributing your perspective to the pool of perspectives all learning and growing and photographing is not a good way to feed your individual ego, but that doesn’t make it a worthless pursuit. Acknowledging that you can only ever photograph how you believe someone else may feel, but never truly see through their eyes is about humility and acceptance of the role photography may play in your wider experience of life.
