Is Photography World Building?

Before you push the shutter button, before even you leave the house, everything has been decided. You might not have a list of photographs you expect to take on the day, but your visual values have already decided what will come out of your day. Building Vision exists before the encounter. When I walk out of the house to take a landscape, I have already something in mind: a location, a relationship between forms, an atmosphere, elements in the frame. Sometimes I know exactly what I’m looking for in every detail; I just know what image I want to produce before I call it a day. Sometimes it’s a bit more fuzzy and some of the elements aren’t well defined even though the overall result is clear. Street photographers work from the same principle, even if it looks different from the outside. Most don’t wait passively for something to happen. Moving through the streets with a sense of human behaviour (think Cartier-Bresson), they’re looking for what they’ve already half-imagined. When it…