Separating the Photograph from Its Birth

Photographers will tell you a good photograph needs to stand on its own. No explanation, no supporting text; what’s in the frame is what you get. If the image only works when you explain it, the thinking goes, it has already failed. My wife reading a book There’s a problem with this I can’t get around, which is that I can’t see my photographs the way strangers do. Every image comes preloaded with memory: the light that morning, what I was trying to do, the specific difficulty of getting the shot. That information is inseparable from my perception of whether the image works. I’m not evaluating a photograph; I’m evaluating a memory with a photograph attached, and those are not the same thing. Personal work operates this way by nature. When you make photographs for yourself, the image carries meaning that’s partly visible in the frame and partly located in your relationship to the moment. When you look at it later, you’re not reading composition and light in isolation; you’re accessing…