You’re Programming Your Future Self

Every photograph exists in two phases: the taking and the revisiting. Most photographers never consciously separate them. That’s part of why so many pictures feel flat on second viewing. An evening in Morocco, 2017 I care about the process of making pictures as much as the pictures themselves. If not more. Aperture, shutter speed, how a particular lens renders a scene. I think about composition the way a carpenter thinks about joints: structurally, in terms of what it does to a frame rather than how it looks. I also care about the message, the feeling, and the purpose of the images I create. This newsletter exists because of that obsession. The revisiting doesn’t begin when you open your photo library six months later. It begins the moment you press the shutter. Every decision you make during the taking programmes how the image will be experienced again. Choose a wide aperture and you’ve already decided that the future version of that scene will have its subject isolated against…