It’s Still Just a Tool

Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris

The other day, I was going through my archive of work ahead of a website redesign, and I found a blog post that I wrote in 2014 that’s sort of an homage to my all-time favorite camera and how after finally acquiring one, I couldn’t bring myself to actually use it. Ten years later, I think the post is still relevant to how some photographers and artists have a tendency to fetishize the tools they use. I know that was me once. For what it’s worth, I think photography is unique in that, because it’s art and science, the potential proficiency of the craft often gets conflated with having the “right” gear. The irony is that it really is the purposeful practice of using our gear, whatever it is, that allows us to get better — to see better. I bought my first SLR in 1982 and I have enjoyed taking pictures ever since. Over the past 40+ years, I’ve used a bunch of different cameras and I’ve enjoyed almost all of them for different reasons. But the one thing that they have in common is the ability to look at the world through a viewfinder — and for me, that’s where the marrow is. As convenient as it is to have an iPhone camera in my pocket that captures fantastic pictures, I love the restriction of a viewfinder and I always have. It lessens the visual noise of the world (to a greater or lesser degree depending on what lens I’m using, of course) and it allows me to practice seeing. In fact, it demands it, doesn’t it? After all, you’re only given a tiny swatch of the world, surrounded by black. What you put in that swatch is up to you, whether you’re observing a scene or creating one from scratch. Photography allows us to impose a point of view on the world around us, or to build one from our imaginations that shows a world we want to see.

See the photos I reference in this episode on Substack: It's Still Just a Tool

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