The Power of Photography

Someone once said that you never really take a picture. Rather a picture presents itself, and it takes you.

That may be. Certain photographs, taken at just the right moment, have an element of divine intervention – especially in photojournalism.

On the other hand, experience guides photographers to the places where a picture can present itself.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs.

Photography is an activity and discipline I have always loved; it’s one of my several creative outlets. What draws me to it may boil down to instant gratification: I love looking through a viewfinder and composing a shot. Certainly the results vary. Composing a shot and capturing a moment are very different (though not mutually exclusive).

My first decent camera was a Pentax 35mm. It shot old-fangled film. I can’t remember the model number (K-1000?) because I’m not a gear-head. A camera, to me, has always been a means to an end.

That Pentax and I parted ways after I left it on a subway car in Washington DC. I replaced it with a better camera, a used Nikon F purchased at a camera store in metro Detroit, where I then lived. It was my main machine for many years, until I finally upgraded to a Nikon digital. The digital Nikon still gets plenty of use, though I take a lot of pictures with my phone, too.

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I’ve been thinking recently about the incredible power of photography. Images can stir a nation’s pride and stir its horror. Consider two of America’s most iconic pictures: the flag raised by Marines on Iwo Jima, and the flag planted by the first astronauts on the moon. Then think of the shootings at Kent State, or children in cages along America’s southern border.

Photography is also a powerful memory trigger. This is probably within everyone’s experience. How many times have you sat down with a stack of old photos, looking for one in particular, only to lose all track of time? (Admittedly, this is far less common now. Instead of prints stuffed into envelopes from the local drug store, pictures live on phones, social media sites, hard disks, and digital picture frames that hold thousands of images and display a new one every five seconds or so.)

Those old pictures can be mesmerizing. Time ceases to exist as you flip through them, moved by image after image, none the one you were looking for, each capable of transporting you to an earlier time and place: faces and events from the past, some of them of people no longer in your orbit. You are immersed, losing all sense of the present. Suddenly half an hour, an hour, even longer, has gone by.

One of the ways I’ve been filling surplus time during this relentless pandemic is by scanning old photos. More precisely I’ve been scanning negatives, which result in images much crisper than scanned prints. I have reams of them, thick binders filled with innumerable negative sleeves, mostly black and white, from an earlier, more carefree period, when I roamed Detroit photographing jazz musicians, cityscapes, friends and foes.

More than just filling time during COVID isolation, scanning these old pictures also satisfies my inner archivist. I am preserving glimpses of an irretrievable past. They serve a more pragmatic purpose, too. I send digitized images, via text message, to distant friends and relatives, including my now-grown children.

This last I do almost daily. We all live hither and yon. The no-longer-kids receive baby pictures (complete with drooling), photos from birthday parties, soccer practices, and even (heaven help me) the prom. It gets us talking, or at least texting. The images connect us to the present and to the past – another of the great powers of photography.